“A lad was playing about the close.

“‘Go and get me a cab!’

“The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quartre-Vents; then they were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.

“‘Ah!  Leon!  Really—­I don’t know—­if I ought,’ she whispered.  Then with a more serious air, ‘Do you know, it is very improper?’

“‘How so?’ replied the clerk.  ‘It is done at Paris.’

“And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her.”

We know now, gentlemen, that the fall did not take place in the cab.  Through a scruple which honors him, the editor of the Revue de Paris has suppressed the passage of the fall in the cab.  But if the Revue lowered the blinds of the cab, it does allow us to penetrate into the room where they found a rendezvous.

Emma wished to leave it, because she had given her word that she would return that evening.

“Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery.”

Once upon the sidewalk, Leon continued to walk; she followed him as far as the hotel; he mounted the stairs, opened the door and entered.  What an embrace!  Words followed each other quickly after the kisses.  They told the disappointments of the week, their presentiments, their fears about the letters; but now all was forgotten, and they were face to face, with their laugh of voluptuousness and terms of endearment.

“The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat.  The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped bed-side; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.

“The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion.”

We are told what happened in that room.  Here is still a passage, very important as a piece of lascivious painting: 

“How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite of its rather faded splendour!  They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins that she had forgotten the Thursday before under the pedestal of the clock.  They lunched by the fireside on a little round table, inlaid with rosewood.  Emma carved, put bits on his plate with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her fingers.  They were so completely lost in the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses eternally young.  They said ‘our room,’ ‘our carpet,’ she even said ’my slippers,’ a gift of Leon’s, a whim she had had.  They were pink satin, bordered with swansdown.  When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was held on only by the toes to her bare foot.