“Excuse me for such gross details.  Those who have not loved in a poetic fashion take and choose women, as you choose a chop in a butcher’s shop without caring about anything save the quality of their flesh.

“Accordingly, I took her to her own house—­for I had a regard for my own sheets.  It was a little working-girl’s lodgings in the fifth story, clean and poor, and I spent two delightful hours there.  This little girl had a certain grace and a rare attractiveness.

“When I was about to leave the room, I advanced towards the mantelpiece in order to place there the stipulated present, after having agreed on a day for a second meeting with the girl, who remained in bed, I got a vague glimpse of a clock without a globe, two flower-vases and two photographs, one of them very old, one of those proofs on glass called daguerreo-types.  I carelessly bent forward towards this portrait, and I remained speechless at the sight, too amazed to comprehend....  It was my own, the first portrait of myself, which I had got taken in the days when I was a student in the Latin Quarter.

“I abruptly snatched it up to examine it more closely.  I did not deceive myself—­and I felt a desire to burst out laughing, so unexpected and queer did the thing appear to me.

“I asked: 

“‘Who is this gentleman?’

“She replied: 

“’Tis my father, whom I did not know.  Mamma left it to me, telling me to keep it, as it might be useful to me, perhaps, one day—­’

“She hesitated, began to laugh, and went on: 

“’I don’t know in what way, upon my word.  I don’t think he’ll care to acknowledge me.’

“My heart went beating wildly, like the mad gallop of a runaway horse.  I replaced the portrait, laying it down flat on the mantelpiece.  On top of it I placed, without even knowing what I was doing, two notes for a hundred francs, which I had in my pocket, and I rushed away, exclaiming: 

“‘We’ll meet again soon—­by-bye, darling—­by-bye.’

“I heard her answering: 

“‘Till Tuesday.’

“I was on the dark staircase, which I descended, groping my way down.

“When I got into the open air, I saw that it was raining, and I started at a great pace down some street or other.

“I walked straight on, stupefied, distracted, trying to jog my memory!  Was this possible?  Yes.  I remembered all of a sudden a girl who had written to me, about a month after our rupture, that she was going to have a child by me.  I had torn or burned the letter, and had forgotten all about the matter.  I should have looked at the woman’s photograph over the girl’s mantelpiece.  But would I have recognized it?  It was the photograph of an old woman, it seemed to me.

“I reached the quay.  I saw a bench, and sat down on it.  It went on raining.  People passed from time to time under umbrellas.  Life appeared to me odious and revolting, full of miseries, of shames, of infamies deliberate or unconscious.  My daughter!...  I had just perhaps possessed my own daughter!  And Paris, this vast Paris, somber, mournful, dirty, sad, black, with all those houses shut up, was full of such things, adulteries, incests, violated children, I recalled to mind what I had been told about bridges haunted by the infamous votaries of vice.