"Juliette!" On seeing me, she utters a cry.... But she regains her composure quickly.... Her eyes defy me. "Leave me alone," she cries out to me. "What are you doing here?... Leave me alone!" I almost crush her wrists, and in a suffocating voice which rattles: "Listen now.... If you make another step ... if you say another word ... I'll knock you dead right here--on this sidewalk, and tramp you to death under my feet." With a heavy blow I strike her in the face and with my nails I furiously claw her forehead and cheeks from which blood is gushing. "Jean! Oh! Jean!... Have mercy, please!... Jean, mercy; Mercy!... Have pity on me!... You are killing me...." Rudely I drag her toward the carriage ... and we get in.... Huddled up in two, she sits there right close to me, sobbing.... What am I going to do now?... I don't know.... In truth I don't know. I don't ask myself any questions. I don't think of anything.... It seems as though a mountain of stone has descended upon me.... I feel the heavy rocks on which my neck has crashed, against which my flesh has been bruised.... Why, with all the black despair in which I find myself, do these high walls rise up towards heaven? Why these dismal birds flying about in unexpected sunshine?... Why is this thing crouched down beside me crying?... Why?... I don't know.... I am going to kill her.... She is in her bedroom without lights, in bed.... I am in the dressing room pacing up and down ... I am walking back and forth with constrained breath, my head on fire, with clinched fists eager to inflict punishment.... I am going to kill her!... From time to time I stop near the door and listen.... She is crying.... And in a minute I will enter.... I will enter and pull her off the bed, drag her by the hair, knock her senseless, break her neck against the marble edges of the fireplace.... I want the room to be red with her blood.... I want to see her body beaten into lumps of battered flesh which I shall throw out with the rest of the rubbish and which the garbage man will take away tomorrow.... Cry, cry!... In a minute you'll howl, my dearest!... Haven't I been stupid!... To think of everything but that!... To fear everything except that!... To say to myself: "she will leave me" and never, never: "she will deceive me...." To have failed to divine the nature of this den, this old man, all this filth!... Really I had never thought of it before, blind fool that I was. She must have laughed when I implored her not to leave me!... To leave me.... Ah! yes, to leave me!... She did not want to, of course.... Now I understand it.... I inspired her neither with probity of heart nor with decency of conduct; I was to her just a label, a trade mark ... a mark of superior value!... Yes, when they saw her in my arms and therefore priced her more highly, she could sell herself for much more than she would have received if, like a nocturnal ghoul, she had roamed the sidewalks and haunted the obscene shadows of the