husband came into the room.  My eyes were bloodshot.  I began to laugh crazily, and when I could speak I said to him, “What would you think of a person who, questioned as to his profession, replied, ’I am a chamber succubus’?” “Ah, my dear, you are ill,” said he.  “Worse than you think,” said I.

“’But if I come to see you, what could we talk about, in the state you yourself are in?  Your letter has completely unbalanced me.  You arraign your malady with a certain brutality which makes my body rejoice but alienates my soul a little.  Ah, what if our dreams could really come true!

    “’Ah, say a word, just one word, from out your own heart.  Don’t
    be afraid that even one of your letters can possibly fall into
    other hands than mine.’

“So, so, so.  This is getting to be no laughing matter,” concluded Durtal, folding up the letter.  “The woman is married to a man who knows me, it seems.  What a situation!  Let’s see, now.  Whom have I ever visited?” He tried vainly to remember.  No woman he had ever met at an evening party would address such declarations to him.  And that common friend.  “But I have no friends, except Des Hermies.  I’d better try and find out whom he has been seeing recently.  But as a physician he meets scores of people!  And then, how can I explain to him?  Tell him the story?  He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got halfway through the narrative.”

And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place.  He was burning for this unknown woman.  He was positively obsessed by her.  He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to believe—­in the teeth of all experience, in the teeth of good judgment—­that with a woman as passionate as this one seemed to be, he would experience superhuman sensations and novel abandon.

And he imagined her as he would have her, blonde, firm of flesh, lithe, feline, melancholy, capable of frenzies; and the picture of her brought on such a tension of nerves that his teeth rattled.

For a week, in the solitude in which he lived, he had dreamed of her and had become thoroughly aroused and incapable of doing any work, even of reading, for the image of this woman interposed itself between him and the page.

He tried suggesting to himself ignoble visions.  He would imagine this creature in moments of corporal distress and thus calm his desires with unappetizing hallucinations; but the procedure which had formerly been very effective when he desired a woman and could not have her now failed utterly.  He somehow could not imagine his unknown in quest of bismuth or of linen.  He could not see her otherwise than rebellious, melancholy, dizzy with desire, kindling him with her eyes, inflaming him with her pale hands.