Suzanne was preparing to go to bed.

To go to bed!  That is not done quickly.  You have, Mesdames, so many little things to do before going to bed.  So Suzanne was going to and fro in her small room, attending to all these little details.

She was in a short petticoat, with her legs and arms bare and her little feet in slippers.  I warned you that I had borrowed the ring of Gyges and I can tell you that I saw her calf and right above the knee, and all was like a sculptor’s model.  Beneath the thin, partly-open cambric her budding bosom rose and fell, marking a voluptuous valley on which, like the Shulamite’s lover, one would never be weary to let one’s kisses wander.

But on seeing the white plump shoulders, the graceful throat, and the neck on which was twisted a mass of little brown curls, and the back of velvet which had no other covering than the thick rolls of half-loosed hair, and the delicate hips which the little half-revealing petticoat closely pressed, one asked oneself where the kisses would run on for the longest time.

She was delicious like this and under every aspect, and undoubtedly she knew it, for every time she passed before the large glass of her wardrobe, she looked at herself in it and smiled.  And she was quite right, for it was indeed the sweetest of sights.

A pretty woman is never insensible to the sight of her own charms.  See therefore, what a love they have for mirrors.  Habit, which palls in so many things, never palls in this; for her it is a sight always charming and always fresh.  Very different to the forgetful lover or the sated husband, whose eyes and senses are so quickly habituated, she never grows weary of finding out that she is pretty, and making herself so; in truth a constant homage, earnest and conscientious.

Suzanne then examined herself full face, in profile, in three-quarters view, and behind, attentively and conscientiously, like an amateur judging a work of art, who cries at length, “Yes, it is all good, it is all perfect, there is nothing amiss.”  One could have believed that she saw herself again for the first time after many years.

At length, when the survey was completed, and the toilette finished, she let her petticoat slip down, opened her bed, put one knee upon it, and, the upper part of her body leaning forward on her hands, prepared to get in.

The lamp on the night-table, close beside her, threw its light no longer on her face.

But at the same instant a little zephyr taking her astern, caused the white tissue which English-women never mention, to gently undulate.

She noticed then that she had forgotten to shut her window.

“Heavens,” cried Marcel to himself, for it was he, who perched on the rise of the road and armed with his good opera-glass, had just been witness of what I have narrated.

LXX.

THE AMBUSCADE.