factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away at the top.  One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist.  The leafless trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were.  Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine hills, like aerial waves that broke silently against a cliff.

A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied theirs.  Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards her.  She poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on the streets, and the old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into which she was entering.  She leant with both hands against the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had spent the night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little family carriages.

They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on other gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down from the “Hirondelle.”

The town was then awakening.  Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips, at intervals uttered sonorous cries at the corners of streets.  She walked with downcast eyes, close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil.

For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most direct road.  She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain that stands there.  It, is the quarter for theatres, public-houses, and whores.  Often a cart would pass near her, bearing some shaking scenery.  Waiters in aprons were sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs.  It all smelt of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that escaped from beneath his hat.

Leon walked along the pavement.  She followed him to the hotel.  He went up, opened the door, entered—­What an embrace!

Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth.  They told each other the sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other’s faces with voluptuous laughs, and tender names.

The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat.  The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped bedside; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.