The ghastly eyes were fixed on Des Esseintes, penetrating him, freezing his very marrow; wilder than ever, the bulldog woman threw herself at him and commenced to howl like a dog at the killing, her head hanging on her rigid neck.

Suddenly he understood the meaning of the frightful vision.  Before him was the image of Syphilis.

Pursued by fear and quite beside himself, he sped down a pathway at top speed and gained a pavillion standing among the laburnums to the left, where he fell into a chair, in the passage way.

After a few moments, when he was beginning to recover his breath, the sound of sobbing made him lift his head.  The bulldog woman was in front of him and, grotesque and woeful, while warm tears fell from her eyes, she told him that she had lost her teeth in her flight.  As she spoke she drew clay pipes from the pocket of her nurse’s apron, breaking them and shoving pieces of the stems into the hollows of her gums.

“But she is really absurd,” Des Esseintes told himself.  “These stems will never stick.”  And, as a matter of fact, they dropped out one after another.

At this moment were heard the galloping sounds of an approaching horse.  A fearful terror pierced Des Esseintes.  His limbs gave way.  The galloping grew louder.  Despair brought him sharply to his senses.  He threw himself upon the woman who was stamping on the pipe bowls, entreating her to be silent, not to give notice of their presence by the sound of her shoes.  She writhed and struggled in his grip; he led her to the end of the corridor, strangling her to prevent her from crying out.  Suddenly he noticed the door of a coffee house, with green Venetian shutters.  It was unlocked; he pushed it, rushed in headlong and then paused.

Before him, in the center of a vast glade, huge white pierrots were leaping rabbit-like under the rays of the moon.

Tears of discouragement welled to his eyes; never, no never would he succeed in crossing the threshold.  “I shall be crushed,” he thought.  And as though to justify his fears, the ranks of tall pierrots swarmed and multiplied; their somersaults now covered the entire horizon, the whole sky on which they landed now on their heads, now on their feet.

Then the hoof beats paused.  He was in the passage, behind a round skylight.  More dead than alive, Des Esseintes turned about and through the round window beheld projecting erect ears, yellow teeth, nostrils from which breathed two jets of vapor smelling of phenol.

He sank to the ground, renouncing all ideas of flight or of resistance.  He closed his eyes so as not to behold the horrible gaze of Syphilis which penetrated through the wall, which even pierced his closed lids, which he felt gliding over his moist spine, over his body whose hair bristled in pools of cold sweat.  He waited for the worst and even hoped for the coup de grace to end everything.  A moment which seemed to last a century passed.  Shuddering, he opened his eyes.  Everything had vanished.  Without any transition, as though by some stage device, a frightful mineral landscape receded into the distance, a wan, dead, waste, gullied landscape.  A light illumined this desolate site, a peaceful white light that recalled gleams of phosphorus dissolved in oil.