The moon had disappeared in an inky sky, whence an icy drizzle was falling.  Two o’clock struck at the Trinite.  The Rue de Provence and the Rue Taitbout lay in shadow, bestarred at intervals by bright splashes of light from the gas lamps, which in the distance were merged in yellow mist.  Muffat did not move from where he was standing.  That was the room.  He remembered it now:  it had hangings of red “andrinople,” and a Louis XIII bed stood at one end of it.  The lamp must be standing on the chimney piece to the right.  Without doubt they had gone to bed, for no shadows passed across the window, and the bright streak gleamed as motionless as the light of a night lamp.  With his eyes still uplifted he began forming a plan; he would ring the bell, go upstairs despite the porter’s remonstrances, break the doors in with a push of his shoulder and fall upon them in the very bed without giving them time to unlace their arms.  For one moment the thought that he had no weapon upon him gave him pause, but directly afterward he decided to throttle them.  He returned to the consideration of his project, and he perfected it while waiting for some sign, some indication, which should bring certainty with it.

Had a woman’s shadow only shown itself at that moment he would have rung.  But the thought that perhaps he was deceiving himself froze him.  How could he be certain?  Doubts began to return.  His wife could not be with that man.  It was monstrous and impossible.  Nevertheless, he stayed where he was and was gradually overcome by a species of torpor which merged into sheer feebleness while he waited long, and the fixity of his gaze induced hallucinations.

A shower was falling.  Two policemen were approaching, and he was forced to leave the doorway where he had taken shelter.  When these were lost to view in the Rue de Provence he returned to his post, wet and shivering.  The luminous streak still traversed the window, and this time he was going away for good when a shadow crossed it.  It moved so quickly that he thought he had deceived himself.  But first one and then another black thing followed quickly after it, and there was a regular commotion in the room.  Riveted anew to the pavement, he experienced an intolerable burning sensation in his inside as he waited to find out the meaning of it all.  Outlines of arms and legs flitted after one another, and an enormous hand traveled about with the silhouette of a water jug.  He distinguished nothing clearly, but he thought he recognized a woman’s headdress.  And he disputed the point with himself; it might well have been Sabine’s hair, only the neck did not seem sufficiently slim.  At that hour of the night he had lost the power of recognition and of action.  In this terrible agony of uncertainty his inside caused him such acute suffering that he pressed against the door in order to calm himself, shivering like a man in rags, as he did so.  Then seeing that despite everything he could not turn his eyes away from the