What made me particularly angry was that she did not let me know ahead of time. She had received my card. She knew she was not coming. And she did not send me a single word! I had cried, implored, begged her on my knees ... and not a word from her! How many tears, how much blood must one shed to soften that heart of flint? How could she run after pleasure with her ears still full of the echoes of my sobs, her mouth still moist with my entreating kisses? The most wretched women, the most detestable creatures at some time or other call a temporary halt to their life of dissipation and prey; there are moments when they permit the sun to penetrate their chilled hearts, when turning their eyes to heaven they pray for love that pardons and redeems! But Juliette ... never! Something more insensible than fate, something more relentless than death was driving her, was eternally drawing and spurring her on without respite, without pause, from impure to criminal love, from that which dishonors to that which kills! The more days passed, the more marks of infamy debauchery left on her. With her passion, formerly so normal and healthy, were now mingled a depraved inquisitiveness and that savage unsatiableness, that over-stimulation of irrepressible lust which comes as result of excessive and sterile pleasures. Except on the nights when exhaustion invested the sordid reality of her existence with unexpected forms of the purest ideal, one could see upon her the imprints of a thousand different and refined corruptions, of a thousand grotesque perversions practiced upon her by those palled by vice and age. Words and cries often escaped her which suddenly lit up her whole life and opened up vistas of frenzied sensuality, and although she would thereby communicate to me the consuming passion of her depravity, although I myself relished in all this a sort of infernal criminal voluptuousness, I could not look at Juliette without a shudder!... And when leaving her embrace, ashamed and disgusted, I felt the need, often experienced by reprobates, of looking at tranquil, restful sights, and I envied,--oh, with what keen regret!--the superior beings who had made purity and virtue the inflexible laws of their life!... I dreamed of convents where one spent one's life in prayer, of hospitals where one devoted oneself to others.... I was seized with a mad desire to enter the disreputable joints and preach the gospel to the unfortunate people who wallow in vice there, never hearing a single word of kindness; I promised myself to follow the prostitutes at night, into the shadow of public squares, to console them, to speak to them of virtue with such passionate earnestness, in accents so touching that they would be moved, would burst into tears and would say to me: "Yes, save us...." I liked to spend hours in the Monceau park, watching the children play, discovering a paradise of goodness in the glances of young mothers; I