But in the bedroom within he would grow dizzy and intoxicated and would forget everything—­the mob of men which constantly crossed it, the sign of mourning which barred its door.  Outside, in the open air of the street, he would weep occasionally out of sheer shame and disgust and would vow never to enter the room again.  And the moment the portiere had closed behind him he was under the old influence once more and felt his whole being melting in the damp warm air of the place, felt his flesh penetrated by a perfume, felt himself overborne by a voluptuous yearning for self-annihilation.  Pious and habituated to ecstatic experiences in sumptuous chapels, he there re-encountered precisely the same mystical sensations as when he knelt under some painted window and gave way to the intoxication of organ music and incense.  Woman swayed him as jealously and despotically as the God of wrath, terrifying him, granting him moments of delight, which were like spasms in their keenness, in return for hours filled with frightful, tormenting visions of hell and eternal tortures.  In Nana’s presence, as in church, the same stammering accents were his, the same prayers and the same fits of despair—­nay, the same paroxysms of humility peculiar to an accursed creature who is crushed down in the mire from whence he has sprung.  His fleshly desires, his spiritual needs, were confounded together and seemed to spring from the obscure depths of his being and to bear but one blossom on the tree of his existence.  He abandoned himself to the power of love and of faith, those twin levers which move the world.  And despite all the struggles of his reason this bedroom of Nana’s always filled him with madness, and he would sink shuddering under the almighty dominion of sex, just as he would swoon before the vast unknown of heaven.

Then when she felt how humble he was Nana grew tyrannously triumphant.  The rage for debasing things was inborn in her.  It did not suffice her to destroy them; she must soil them too.  Her delicate hands left abominable traces and themselves decomposed whatever they had broken.  And he in his imbecile condition lent himself to this sort of sport, for he was possessed by vaguely remembered stories of saints who were devoured by vermin and in turn devoured their own excrements.  When once she had him fast in her room and the doors were shut, she treated herself to a man’s infamy.  At first they joked together, and she would deal him light blows and impose quaint tasks on him, making him lisp like a child and repeat tags of sentences.

“Say as I do:  ’tonfound it!  Ickle man damn vell don’t tare about it!”

He would prove so docile as to reproduce her very accent.

“’Tonfound it!  Ickle man damn vell don’t tare about it!”

Or again she would play bear, walking on all fours on her rugs when she had only her chemise on and turning round with a growl as though she wanted to eat him.  She would even nibble his calves for the fun of the thing.  Then, getting up again: