d curiosity, and some unknown longing. She was
continually thinking of Paris, and read the fashionable papers eagerly.
The accounts of parties, of the dresses and various entertainments,
excited her longing; but, above all, she was strangely agitated by those
paragraphs which were full of double meaning, by those veils which were
half raised by clever phrases, and which gave her a glimpse of culpable
and ravishing delights, and from her country home, she saw Paris in an
apotheosis of magnificent and corrupt luxury.

And during the long nights, when she dreamt, lulled by the regular
snores of her husband, who was sleeping on his back by her side, with a
silk handkerchief tied round his head, she saw in her sleep those
well-known men whose names appeared on the first page of the newspapers
as great stars in the dark skies; and she pictured to herself their life
of continual excitement, of constant debauches, of orgies such as they
indulged in in ancient Rome, which were horridly voluptuous, with
refinements of sensuality which were so complicated that she could not
even picture them to herself.

The boulevards seemed to her to be a kind of abyss of human passions,
and there could be no doubt that the houses there concealed mysteries of
prodigious love. But she felt that she was growing old, and this,
without having known life, except in those regular, horridly monotonous,
everyday occupations, which constitute the happiness of the home. She
was still pretty, for she was well preserved in her tranquil existence,
like some winter fruit in a closed cupboard; but she was agitated and
devoured by her secret ardor. She used to ask herself whether she should
die without having experienced any of those damning, intoxicating joys,
without having plunged once, just once into that flood of Parisian
voluptuousness.

By dint of much perseverance, she paved the way for a journey to Paris,
found a pretext, got some relations to invite her, and as her husband
could not go with her, she went alone, and as soon as she arrived, she
invented a reason for remaining for two days, or rather for two nights,
if necessary, as she told him that she had met some friends who lived a
little way out of town.

And then she set out on a voyage of discovery. She went up and down the
boulevards, without seeing anything except roving and numbered vice. She
looked into the large _cafes_, and read the _Agony Column_ of the
_Figaro_, which every morning se