How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips!  For some reason or other this last statement of hers brought me immense comfort.

“Yes?” I whispered breathlessly.

“Yes!  But in that case what’s the use of living in fear and torment?” she went on, revealing a little more of herself to my astonishment.  She opened the door for me and added: 

“Those that don’t care to stoop ought at least make themselves happy.”

I turned in the very doorway:  “There is something which prevents that?” I suggested.

“To be sure there is.  Bonjour, Monsieur.”

PART FOUR

CHAPTER I

“Such a charming lady in a grey silk dress and a hand as white as snow.  She looked at me through such funny glasses on the end of a long handle.  A very great lady but her voice was as kind as the voice of a saint.  I have never seen anything like that.  She made me feel so timid.”

The voice uttering these words was the voice of Therese and I looked at her from a bed draped heavily in brown silk curtains fantastically looped up from ceiling to floor.  The glow of a sunshiny day was toned down by closed jalousies to a mere transparency of darkness.  In this thin medium Therese’s form appeared flat, without detail, as if cut out of black paper.  It glided towards the window and with a click and a scrape let in the full flood of light which smote my aching eyeballs painfully.

In truth all that night had been the abomination of desolation to me.  After wrestling with my thoughts, if the acute consciousness of a woman’s existence may be called a thought, I had apparently dropped off to sleep only to go on wrestling with a nightmare, a senseless and terrifying dream of being in bonds which, even after waking, made me feel powerless in all my limbs.  I lay still, suffering acutely from a renewed sense of existence, unable to lift an arm, and wondering why I was not at sea, how long I had slept, how long Therese had been talking before her voice had reached me in that purgatory of hopeless longing and unanswerable questions to which I was condemned.

It was Therese’s habit to begin talking directly she entered the room with the tray of morning coffee.  This was her method for waking me up.  I generally regained the consciousness of the external world on some pious phrase asserting the spiritual comfort of early mass, or on angry lamentations about the unconscionable rapacity of the dealers in fish and vegetables; for after mass it was Therese’s practice to do the marketing for the house.  As a matter of fact the necessity of having to pay, to actually give money to people, infuriated the pious Therese.  But the matter of this morning’s speech was so extraordinary that it might have been the prolongation of a nightmare:  a man in bonds having to listen to weird and unaccountable speeches against which, he doesn’t know why, his very soul revolts.