They laughed about it all the way to St. Germain.  They walked about La Grenonillere establishment with stately steps like queens; and seemed to glory in their fame, rejoicing in the gaze that was fixed on them, so superior to this crowd, to this mob, to these plebeians.

Madeleine and her lover watched them approach and in the girl’s eyes a fire lightened.

When the two first had reached the end of the table, Madeleine cried: 

“Pauline!”

The large woman turned herself and stopped, continuing all the time to hold the arm of her feminine cabin boy: 

“Good gracious, Madeleine....  Do come and talk to me, my dear.”

Paul squeezed his fingers upon his mistress’s wrist; but she said to him, with such an air: 

“You know, my fine fellow, you can be off;” he said nothing and remained alone.

Then they chatted in low voices, standing all three of them.  Many pleasant jests passed their lips, they spoke quickly; and Pauline looked now and then at Paul, by stealth, with a shrewd and malicious smile.

At last, putting up with it no longer, he suddenly raised himself and in a single bound was at their side, trembling in every limb.  He seized Madeleine by the shoulders: 

“Come.  I wish it,” said he.  “I have forbidden you to speak to these scoundrels.”

Whereupon Pauline raised her voice and set to work blackguarding him with her Billingsgate vocabulary.  All the bystanders laughed; they drew near him; they raised themselves on tiptoe in order the better to see him.  He remained dumbfounded under this downpour of filthy abuse.  It appeared to him that these words, which came from that mouth and fell upon him, defiled him like dirt, and, in presence of the row which was beginning, he fell back, retraced his steps, and rested his elbows on the railing towards the river, turning his back upon the three victorious women.

There he stayed watching the water, and sometimes with rapid gesture as though he plucked it out, he removed with his sinewy fingers the tear which had formed in his eye.

The fact was that he was hopelessly in love, without knowing why, notwithstanding his refined instincts, in spite of his reason, in spite, indeed, of his will.  He had fallen into this love as one falls into a sloughy hole.  Of a tender and delicate disposition, he had dreamed of liaisons, exquisite, ideal and impassioned, and there that little bit of a woman, stupid like all girls, with an exasperating stupidity, not even pretty, thin and a spitfire, had taken him prisoner, possessing him from head to foot, body and soul.  He underwent this feminine bewitchery, mysterious and all powerful, this unknown power, this prodigious domination, arising no one knows whence, from the demon of the flesh, which casts the most sensible man at the feet of some girl or other without there being anything in her to explain her fatal and sovereign power.