“She looked at me. Then I saw her enter a house in the Rue de Presbourg. I waited two hours in a doorway. She did not come out. At last I decided to question the concierge. He did not appear to understand me. ‘She must have been a caller,’ he said.
“And it was eight months before I saw her again.
“Then one January morning, during a spell of Arctic cold, I was on my way down the Boulevard Malesherbes and running to warm myself, when at the corner of a street I collided so violently with a woman that she dropped a small parcel.
“I began apologies. It was she!
“For a moment I stood still, stunned by the suddenness of the shock; then, giving her back the parcel she had been carrying in her hand, I said abruptly:
“ ‘I am distressed and overjoyed, madame, to have rushed into you like this. Will you believe me that for more than two years I have noticed you, admired you, longed cruelly to make your acquaintance, and I could not manage to find out who you were nor where you lived? Pardon words like these, ascribe them to my passionate desire to be numbered among those who have the right to speak to you. Such a feeling could not wrong you, could it? You do not know me. I am Baron Roger des Annettes. Make your own inquiries: you will be told that I am a man you can admit to your house. If you refuse my request now, you will make me the most miserable wretch alive. I implore you, be kind, give me, allow me the chance to visit you.’
“She regarded me intently, out of her strange lustreless eyes, and answered smiling:
“ ‘Give me your address. I will come to your house.’
“I was so utterly dumbfounded that I must have shown it. But I am never long in recovering from such shocks and I hastened to give her a card, which she slipped into her pocket with a swift gesture, with a hand evidently used to manipulating clandestine letters.
“Becoming bold, I stammered:
“ ‘When shall I see you?’
“She hesitated, as if she had to make a complicated calculation, no doubt trying to recollect just what she had to do with each hour of her time; then she murmured:
“ ‘Sunday morning, is that right for you?’
“ ‘I am quite sure that it is all right.’
“Then she went away, after she had searched my face, judged me, summed me up, dissected me with that heavy insensible stare that seemed to leave something on one’s skin, a kind of viscous fluid, as if her glance flung out on to human beings one of those dense liquids which devilfish use to cloud the water and lull their prey to sleep.
“All the time until Sunday, I gave myself up to the most desperate cudgelling of my wits, in the effort to make up my mind what she was and ascertain the correct attitude to adopt to her.
“Ought I to give her money? How much?
“I decided to buy a piece of jewellery, an uncommonly charming piece of jewellery too, and I placed it, in its case, on the mantelshelf.
“I waited for her, after a restless night.
“She arrived about ten o’clock, quite calm, quite placid, and gave me her hand as if we were old friends. I offered her a seat, I relieved her of her hat, her veil, her furs, her muff. Then, slightly embarrassed, I began to press her somewhat more hardily, for I had no time to lose.
“She asked for nothing better, and we had not exchanged twenty words before I began to undress her. She herself continued this ticklish business that I never succeed in finishing: I prick myself on pins, I twist strings into inextricable knots instead of undoing them; I mismanage and confuse everything, I delay it all and I lose my head.
“Do you know any moment in life, my dear, more marvellous than the moments when you are watching—standing just far enough away and using just enough discretion to avoid startling that ostrich modesty all women affect—a woman who is stripping herself for you of all the rustling garments that fall round her feet, one after another?
“And what is prettier, too, than the gestures with which they put off those adorable garments that slip to the ground, empty and stretched indolently out as if they had just been struck dead? How glorious and intoxicating is the revelation of her flesh, her naked arms and breasts after her bodice is off, and how disturbing the lines of her body glimpsed under the last veil of all!
“But all at once I saw an amazing thing, a black stain between her shoulders; for she had turned her back to me: a wide stain standing vividly out, black as night. I had promised, moreover, not to look at her.
“What was it? I had not the least doubt what it was, however, and the memory of that clearly visible moustache, the eyebrows joined above the eyes, of that mop of hair which covered her head like a helmet, ought to have prepared me for this shock.
“I was none the less dumbfounded and my mind was thronged suddenly with swift thoughts and strange remembered things. I imagined that I was looking at one of those enchantresses from the Thousand and One Nights, one of those fatal and faithless creatures who exist only to drag mortal men into unknown abysses. I thought of Solomon making the Queen of Sheba walk over a mirror to assure himself that she had not a cloven hoof.
“And … and when it came to the point of singing her my song of love, I discovered that I had no voice left, not even a trickle of sound, my dear. Or let’s say I had a voice like
