As soon as they were in the room, she undressed herself quickly, and retired without saying a word, and then she waited for him, cowering against the wall.  But she was as simple as it was possible for a provincial lawyer’s wife to be, and he was more exacting than a pascha with three tails, and so they did not at all understand each other.  At last, however, he went to sleep, and the night passed, and the silence was only disturbed by the tick-tack of the clock, and she, lying motionless, thought of her conjugal nights; and by the light of the Chinese lantern, she looked, nearly heart-broken, at the little fat man lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the bed-clothes like a balloon filled with gas.  He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings.  His few hairs profited by his sleep, to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover, and a small stream of saliva was running out of one corner of his half-open mouth.

At last the daylight appeared through the drawn blinds; so she got up and dressed herself without making any noise, and she had already half opened the door, when she made the lock creak, and he woke up and rubbed his eyes.  He was some moments before he quite came to himself, and then, when he remembered all that had happened, he said:  “What!  Are you going already?” She remained standing, in some confusion, and then she said, in a hesitating voice:  “Yes, of course; it is morning...”

Then he sat up, and said:  “Look here, I have something to ask you, in my turn.”  And as she did not reply, he went on:  “You have surprised me most confoundedly since yesterday.  Be open, and tell me why you did it all, for upon my word I cannot understand it in the least.”  She went close up to him, blushing like as if she had been a virgin, and said:  “I wanted to know ... what ... what vice ... really was, ... and ... well ... well, it is not at all funny.”

And she ran out of the room, and downstairs into the street.

A number of sweepers were busy in the streets, brushing the pavements, the roadway, and sweeping everything on one side.  With the same regular motion, the motion of mowers in a meadow, they pushed the mud in front of them in a semi-circle, and she met them in every street, like dancing puppets, walking automatically with their swaying motion.  And it seemed to her as if something had been swept out of her; as if her over-excited dreams had been pushed into the gutter, or into the drain, and so she went home, out of breath, and very cold, and all that she could remember was the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping the streets of Paris in the early morning.

As soon as she got into her room, she threw herself onto her bed and cried.

MADAME BAPTISTE