“It’s your turn now; try it a bit.  I bet you don’t play bear like me.”

It was still charming enough.  As bear she amused him with her white skin and her fell of ruddy hair.  He used to laugh and go down on all fours, too, and growl and bite her calves, while she ran from him with an affectation of terror.

“Are we beasts, eh?” she would end by saying.  “You’ve no notion how ugly you are, my pet!  Just think if they were to see you like that at the Tuileries!”

But ere long these little games were spoiled.  It was not cruelty in her case, for she was still a good-natured girl; it was as though a passing wind of madness were blowing ever more strongly in the shut-up bedroom.  A storm of lust disordered their brains, plunged them into the delirious imaginations of the flesh.  The old pious terrors of their sleepless nights were now transforming themselves into a thirst for bestiality, a furious longing to walk on all fours, to growl and to bite.  One day when he was playing bear she pushed him so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture, and when she saw the lump on his forehead she burst into involuntary laughter.  After that her experiments on La Faloise having whetted her appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing him and chasing him to an accompaniment of kicks.

“Gee up!  Gee up!  You’re a horse.  Hoi!  Gee up!  Won’t you hurry up, you dirty screw?”

At other times he was a dog.  She would throw her scented handkerchief to the far end of the room, and he had to run and pick it up with his teeth, dragging himself along on hands and knees.

“Fetch it, Caesar!  Look here, I’ll give you what for if you don’t look sharp!  Well done, Caesar!  Good dog!  Nice old fellow!  Now behave pretty!”

And he loved his abasement and delighted in being a brute beast.  He longed to sink still further and would cry: 

“Hit harder.  On, on!  I’m wild!  Hit away!”

She was seized with a whim and insisted on his coming to her one night clad in his magnificent chamberlain’s costume.  Then how she did laugh and make fun of him when she had him there in all his glory, with the sword and the cocked hat and the white breeches and the full-bottomed coat of red cloth laced with gold and the symbolic key hanging on its left-hand skirt.  This key made her especially merry and urged her to a wildly fanciful and extremely filthy discussion of it.  Laughing without cease and carried away by her irreverence for pomp and by the joy of debasing him in the official dignity of his costume, she shook him, pinched him, shouted, “Oh, get along with ye, Chamberlain!” and ended by an accompaniment of swinging kicks behind.  Oh, those kicks!  How heartily she rained them on the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court, throning on high above an abject and trembling people.  That’s what she thought of society!  That was her revenge!  It was an affair of unconscious