She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing.  From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.

Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a physician who finds a patient’s illness more serious than the latter is willing to acknowledge.

“You are very unhappy, Marianne!” he remarked.

“I?  Nonsense!  Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy.  There is still something great in misery.  That can be battled against.  It is like thunder.  But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its liquid mud, that—­ah! that, ugh! that is crushing.  And in my life it rains, it rains with terrible constancy.”

As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.

“Life?  My life?  A mere millstone mechanically revolving.  A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst.  Do you understand?  The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman.  My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—­whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one.  I desire to be my own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person.  I have but one desire, hear—­”

“What?” asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.

“My pleasure,” Marianne replied, “is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life:  books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what.  My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret.  I shall cloister myself.  I shall stretch myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,—­as happens sometimes—­an aneurism, a congestion, or I don’t know what, should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am, nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line.  Ah! those plans are not very lively, are they?  Well, my dear, such are my good moments.  Judge of the others, then.”