He looked at her and saw her blush, somewhat disturbed, as though this
sudden question had aroused within her some delicate recollections.
After one of these feminine hesitations, so short that they can scarcely
be guessed, she replied: "A friend of mine," and then, after a brief
silence, added, "who is dead." And she cast down her eyes with a very
natural sadness.
Duroy, for the first time, thought of all that he did not know as
regarded the past life of this woman. Certainly she already had lovers,
but of what kind, in what class of society? A vague jealousy, a species
of enmity awoke within him; an enmity against all that he did not know,
all that had not belonged to him. He looked at her, irritated at the
mystery wrapped up within that pretty, silent head, which was thinking,
perhaps, at that very moment, of the other, the others, regretfully. How
he would have liked to have looked into her recollections--to have known
all.
She repeated: "Will you take me to the Reine Blanche? That will be a
perfect treat."
He thought: "What matters the past? I am very foolish to bother about
it," and smilingly replied: "Certainly, darling."
When they were in the street she resumed, in that low and mysterious
tone in which confidences are made: "I dared not ask you this until now,
but you cannot imagine how I love these escapades in places ladies do
not go to. During the carnival I will dress up as a schoolboy. I make
such a capital boy."
When they entered the ball-room she clung close to him, gazing with
delighted eyes on the girls and the bullies, and from time to time, as
though to reassure herself as regards any possible danger, saying, as
she noticed some serious and motionless municipal guard: "That is a
strong-looking fellow." In a quarter of an hour she had had enough of it
and he escorted her home.
Then began quite a series of excursions in all the queer places where
the common people amuse themselves, and Duroy discovered in his mistress
quite a liking for this vagabondage of students bent on a spree. She
came to their meeting-place in a cotton frock and with a servant's
cap--a theatrical servant's cap--on her head; and despite the elegant
and studied simplicity of her toilet, retained her rings, her bracelets,
and her diamond earrings, saying, when he begged her to remove them:
"Bah! they will think they are paste."
She thought she was admirably disguised, and although she was really
only concealed after the fashion of an ostrich, she went into the most
ill-famed drinking places. She wanted Duroy to dress himself like a
workman, but he resisted, and retained his correct attire, without even
consenting to exchange his tall hat for one of soft felt. She was
consoled for this obstinacy on his part by the reflection that she would
be taken for a chambermaid engaged in a love affair with a gentleman,
and thought this delightful. In this guise they went into popular
wine-shops, and sat down on rickety chairs at old wooden tables in
smoke-filled rooms. A cloud of strong tobacco smoke, with which still
blended the smell of fish fried at dinner time, filled the room; men in
blouses shouted at one another as they tossed off nips of spirits; and
the astonished waiter would stare at this strange couple as he placed
before them two cherry brandies. She--trembling, fearsome, yet
charmed--began to sip the red liquid, looking round her with uneasy and
kindling eye. Each cherry swallowed gave her the sensation of a sin
committed, each drop of burning liquor flowing down her throat gave her
the pleasure of a naughty and forbidden joy.
Then she would say, "Let us go," and they would leave. She would pass
rapidly, with bent head and the short steps of an actress leaving the
stage, among the drinkers, who, with their elbows on the tables, watched
her go by with suspicious and dissatisfied glances; and when she had
crossed the threshold would give a deep sigh, as if she had just escaped
some terrible danger.
Sometimes she asked Duroy, with a shudder: "If I were insulted in these
places, what would you do?"