The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion.  The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in.  On the chimney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear.

How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather faded splendour!  They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under the pedestal of the clock.  They lunched by the fireside on a little round table, inlaid with rosewood.  Emma carved, put bits on his plate with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her fingers.  They were so completely lost in the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses eternally young.  They said “our room,” “our carpet,” she even said “my slippers,” a gift of Leon’s, a whim she had had.  They were pink satin, bordered with swansdown.  When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was held only by the toes to her bare foot.

He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine refinements.  He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of clothing, these poses of the weary dove.  He admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace on her petticoat.  Besides, was she not “a lady” and a married woman—­a real mistress, in fine?

By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative, taciturn, passionate, careless, she awakened in him a thousand desires, called up instincts or memories.  She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague “she” of all the volumes of verse.  He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the “Odalisque Bathing”; she had the long waist of feudal chatelaines, and she resembled the “Pale Woman of Barcelona.”  But above all she was the Angel!

Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and descended drawn down into the whiteness of her breast.  He knelt on the ground before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a smile, his face upturned.

She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with intoxication—­

“Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me!  Something so sweet comes from your eyes that helps me so much!”

She called him “child.”  “Child, do you love me?”

And she did not listen for his answer in the haste of her lips that fastened to his mouth.

On the clock there was a bronze cupid, who smirked as he bent his arm beneath a golden garland.  They had laughed at it many a time, but when they had to part everything seemed serious to them.