his questions.  The man had been present; why should she not be with him now?  The more he thought about it the more possible the whole story became, and he ended by thinking it natural and even inevitable.  While he was in his shirt sleeves in the house of a harlot his wife was undressing in her lover’s room.  Nothing could be simpler or more logical!  Reasoning in this way, he forced himself to keep cool.  He felt as if there were a great downward movement in the direction of fleshly madness, a movement which, as it grew, was overcoming the whole world round about him.  Warm images pursued him in imagination.  A naked Nana suddenly evoked a naked Sabine.  At this vision, which seemed to bring them together in shameless relationship and under the influence of the same lusts, he literally stumbled, and in the road a cab nearly ran over him.  Some women who had come out of a cafe jostled him amid loud laughter.  Then a fit of weeping once more overcame him, despite all his efforts to the contrary, and, not wishing to shed tears in the presence of others, he plunged into a dark and empty street.  It was the Rue Rossini, and along its silent length he wept like a child.

“It’s over with us,” he said in hollow tones.  “There’s nothing left us now, nothing left us now!”

He wept so violently that he had to lean up against a door as he buried his face in his wet hands.  A noise of footsteps drove him away.  He felt a shame and a fear which made him fly before people’s faces with the restless step of a bird of darkness.  When passers-by met him on the pavement he did his best to look and walk in a leisurely way, for he fancied they were reading his secret in the very swing of his shoulders.  He had followed the Rue de la Grange Bateliere as far as the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, where the brilliant lamplight surprised him, and he retraced his steps.  For nearly an hour he traversed the district thus, choosing always the darkest corners.  Doubtless there was some goal whither his steps were patiently, instinctively, leading him through a labyrinth of endless turnings.  At length he lifted his eyes up it a street corner.  He had reached his destination, the point where the Rue Taitbout and the Rue de la Provence met.  He had taken an hour amid his painful mental sufferings to arrive at a place he could have reached in five minutes.  One morning a month ago he remembered going up to Fauchery’s rooms to thank him for a notice of a ball at the Tuileries, in which the journalist had mentioned him.  The flat was between the ground floor and the first story and had a row of small square windows which were half hidden by the colossal signboard belonging to a shop.  The last window on the left was bisected by a brilliant band of lamplight coming from between the half-closed curtains.  And he remained absorbed and expectant, with his gaze fixed on this shining streak.