The rain continued to fall.  He heard it patter on the panes which formed a ceiling at the end of the room; it fell in cascades down the spouts.  No one was stirring in the room.  Everybody, utterly weary, was indulging himself in front of his wine glass.

Tongues were now wagging freely.  As almost all the English men and women raised their eyes as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that they were talking of the bad weather; not one of them laughed.  He threw a delighted glance on their suits whose color and cut did not perceivably differ from that of others, and he experienced a sense of contentment in not being out of tune in this environment, of being, in some way, though superficially, a naturalized London citizen.  Then he suddenly started.  “And what about the train?” he asked himself.  He glanced at his watch:  ten minutes to eight.  “I still have nearly a half-hour to remain here.”  Once more, he began to muse upon the plan he had conceived.

In his sedentary life, only two countries had ever attracted him:  Holland and England.

He had satisfied the first of his desires.  Unable to keep away, one fine day he had left Paris and visited the towns of the Low Lands, one by one.

In short, nothing but cruel disillusions had resulted from this trip.  He had fancied a Holland after the works of Teniers and Steen, of Rembrandt and Ostade, in his usual way imagining rich, unique and incomparable Ghettos, had thought of amazing kermesses, continual debauches in the country sides, intent for a view of that patriarchal simplicity, that jovial lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters.

Certainly, Haarlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him.  The unwashed people, seen in their country farms, really resembled those types painted by Van Ostade, with their uncouth children and their old fat women, embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies.  But of the unrestrained joys, the drunken family carousals, not a whit.  He had to admit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him.  They had simply served as a springing board for his dreams.  He had rushed forward on a false track and had wandered into capricious visions, unable to discover in the land itself, anything of that real and magical country which he had hoped to behold, seeing nothing at all, on the plots of ground strewn with barrels, of the dances of petticoated and stockinged peasants crying for very joy, stamping their feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly.

Decidedly nothing of all this was visible.  Holland was a country just like any other country, and what was more, a country in no wise primitive, not at all simple, for the Protestant religion with its formal hypocricies and solemn rigidness held sway here.

The memory of that disenchantment returned to him.  Once more he glanced at his watch:  ten minutes still separated him from the train’s departure.  “It is about time to ask for the bill and leave,” he told himself.