Fanfarlo, at first astonished, was quite willing to lend herself to the eccentricity of the man she had chosen, and Flore was summoned; it was no use the latter representing that it was three o’clock in the morning, that everything was locked up at the theatre, the concierge asleep, the weather frightful—the storm was still raging; she who herself obeyed, had to be obeyed, and the chambermaid went out. Suddenly Cramer, seized with a new idea, clung to the bell-pull, and shouted in a voice of thunder:

‘Hey, don’t forget the rouge!’

This characteristic trait, which was related by Fanfarlo herself one evening when her comrades were asking her about the beginning of her liaison with Samuel, in no way astonished me; I well recognized in this the author of the Ospreys. He will always love rouge and ceruse, chrysocolla and tinsel of every sort. He would be quite prepared to repaint the trees and the sky, and if God had entrusted him with the plan of nature, perhaps he would have spoiled it.

Though Samuel had a depraved imagination, and perhaps for that very reason, love was with him less an affair of the senses than of the reason. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; reproduction he regarded as a vice of love, pregnancy a spiderish disease. Somewhere he has written: ‘Angels are hermaphroditic and sterile’. He loved a human body like a material harmony, like a fine piece of architecture plus movement; and this absolute materialism was not far removed from the purest idealism. But, as in beauty, which is the cause of love, there were, according to him, two elements: line and appeal—and because all this concerns only line—the appeal for him, at least that evening, was rouge.

So Fanfarlo summed up for him line and appeal: and when, seated on the edge of the bed, in the care- free, victorious tranquillity of the loved woman, her hands delicately resting upon him, Samuel looked at her, it seemed to him that he saw the infinite behind the bright eyes of this beauty, and that gradually his own looked down on immense horizons. Besides, as often happens with exceptional men, he was often alone in his paradise, none being able to inhabit it with him. And if, by chance, he ravished and dragged her thither almost by force, she always lagged behind; consequently in the heaven where it held sway, his love began to be sick and sad of an azure melancholy like a solitary king. However, he never got tired of her; never, on leaving his amorous retreat, walking briskly on a pavement in the fresh morning air, did he experience that selfish cigar and hands-in-pocket enjoyment of which our great novelist²

If he had no heart, Samuel had a noble intelligence and, instead of gratitude, enjoyment had engendered in him that luscious contentment, that sensual dreaminess which is perhaps better than love as the vulgar understand it. Besides, Fanfarlo had done her best and dispensed her most cunning caresses, having observed that the man was worth the trouble: she had grown accustomed to that mystic language variegated with impurities and enormous crudities. That had for her at least the attraction of novelty.

The dancer’s escapade had made its scandal. There were several ‘no performances’ on the bill; she had neglected rehearsals; many people envied Samuel.

One evening when chance, M. de Cosmelly’s ennui, or some complicated manœuvre of his wife’s, had brought them together at the fireside; after one of those long silences which occur in household where husband and wife have nothing more to say to each other, or a great deal to conceal; after having made him the best possible tea in a very modest and very cracked teapot, perhaps still the one from her aunt’s château; after having sung at the piano a few selections from music in vogue ten years ago; she said to him, with the sweet and prudent voice of virtue anxious to be amiable and afraid of scaring the object of its affections, that she pitied him very much, that she cried a lot, more about him than about herself; that she would have liked at least, in her very submissive and devoted resignation, that he might have found elsewhere than with her the love which he no longer wanted from his wife; that she had suffered more at seeing him deceived than at being herself abandoned; that, besides, she was very much to blame, that she had forgotten her tender, wifely duties in not warning her husband of the danger; that, besides, she was quite ready to close that bleeding wound, and by herself alone to repair an imprudence committed