There he stopped and drew the fresh air deep into his lungs.  Hyacinthe, motionless, dizzy, huddled to the wall away from him.

He looked at her.  “Confess that you would like to go in there again.”

“No,” she said with an effort.  “These scenes shatter me.  I am in a daze.  I must have a glass of water.”

And she went up the street, leaning on him, straight to the wine shop, which was open.  It was an ignoble lair, a little room with tables and wooden benches, a zinc counter, cheap bar fixtures, and blue-stained wooden pitchers; in the ceiling a U-shaped gas bracket.  Two pick-and-shovel labourers were playing cards.  They turned around and laughed.  The proprietor took the excessively short-stemmed pipe from his mouth and spat into the sawdust.  He seemed not at all surprised to see this fashionably gowned woman in his dive.  Durtal, who was watching him, thought he surprised an understanding look exchanged by the proprietor and the woman.

The proprietor lighted a candle and mumbled into Durtal’s ear, “Monsieur, you can’t drink here with these people watching.  I’ll take you to a room where you can be alone.”

“Hmmm,” said Durtal to Hyacinthe, who was penetrating the mysteries of a spiral staircase, “A lot of fuss for a glass of water!”

But she had already entered a musty room.  The paper was peeling from the walls, which were nearly covered with pictures torn out of illustrated weeklies and tacked up with hairpins.  The floor was all in pieces.  There were a wooden bed without any curtains, a chamber pot with a piece broken out of the side, a wash bowl and two chairs.

The man brought a decanter of gin, a large one of water, some sugar, and glasses, then went downstairs.

Her eyes were sombre, mad.  She enlaced Durtal.

“No!” he shouted, furious at having fallen into this trap.  “I’ve had enough of that.  It’s late.  Your husband is waiting for you.  It’s time for you to go back to him—­”

She did not even hear him.

“I want you,” she said, and she took him treacherously and obliged him to desire her.  She disrobed, threw her skirts on the floor, opened wide the abominable couch, and raising her chemise in the back she rubbed her spine up and down over the coarse grain of the sheets.  A look of swooning ecstasy was in her eyes and a smile of joy on her lips.

She seized him, and, with ghoulish fury, dragged him into obscenities of whose existence he had never dreamed.  Suddenly, when he was able to escape, he shuddered, for he perceived that the bed was strewn with fragments of hosts.

“Oh, you fill me with horror!  Dress, and let’s get out of here.”

While, with a faraway look in her eyes, she was silently putting on her clothes, he sat down on a chair.  The fetidness of the room nauseated him.  Then, too—­he was not absolutely convinced of Transubstantiation—­he did not believe very firmly that the Saviour resided in that soiled bread—­but—­In spite of himself, the sacrilege he had involuntarily participated in saddened him.