to see the tombs at Dreux, or to
Compiegne, on the painter's advice, to watch the sun setting through the
forest--after which they went on to the Chateau of Pierrefonds.

"To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who
have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly
bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or
Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of
that she trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded
of creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of
Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge
of art, I should say, to do that; though, surely, even without any
particularly refined sense of smell, one would not deliberately choose
to spend a holiday in the latrines, so as to be within range of their
fragrant exhalations."

But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds--alas, without
allowing him to appear there, as though by accident, at her side, for,
as she said, that would "create a dreadful impression,"--he would plunge
into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway
timetable, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the
afternoon, in the evening, even in the morning. The ways? More than
that, the authority, the right to join her. For, after all, the
time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the
public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that
at eight o'clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which
arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds
was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous;
an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether
different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never
even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified
the labour and expense of stoking the engines.

So it came to this; that she could not prevent him from going to
Pierrefonds if he chose to do so. Now that was precisely what he found
that he did choose to do, and would at that moment be doing were he,
like the travelling public, not acquainted with Odette. For a long
time past he had wanted to form a more definite impression of
Viollet-le-Duc's work as a restorer. And the weather being what it was,
he felt an overwhelming desire to spend the day roaming in the forest of
Com