"Juliette!... My own Juliette ... don't sleep.... Oh, please don't sleep!... You frighten me!... Let me see your eyes; talk to me, talk to me!... And pinch me, pinch yourself, too, pinch me hard.... But don't sleep any more, please...." She cuddles into my arms, whispers some unintelligible words and falls asleep again, her head hanging on my shoulder.... But the apparition of death, stronger than the awakening of love, persists, and although I feel the regular beating of Juliette's heart against my own, it does not vanish until day. How often since that time, when with her, I have felt the frigid touch of death in her fiery kisses!... And how often in the midst of rapture there appeared to me the sudden and capering image of the singer at the Bouffes!... How many times did his lustful laugh drown the ardent words of Juliette!... How often I have heard him say to me, while his image kept leaping above me: "Go ahead, glut yourself upon this imbecile body, upon this unclean body which I defiled!... Go on!... Go on! ... wherever you touch your lips you will breathe the impure odor of my own; wherever your caresses may wander upon this body of a prostitute they will encounter the filthy marks of my own manhandling.... Go ahead, wash her, your Juliette, wash her in the lustral water of your love, cleanse her with the acid of your mouth.... Strip off her skin with your teeth, if you will; you will efface nothing, never, because the mark of infamy with which I have branded her is ineffaceable." And I often had a passionate desire to question Juliette about this singer whose vision haunted me so much. But I had not the courage. I contented myself with trying to get at the truth in an ingenious, roundabout way: often, in the midst of conversation I would mention a name unexpectedly, hoping, yes hoping that Juliette would be a little put out by it, that she would blush, would feel embarrassed and would say: "Yes, that's the one." I thus exhausted the list of names of all the singers in all the theatres, without gaining the least evidence of perturbation in Juliette's impenetrable attitude. It took us almost three months to install ourselves completely. The upholsterers could never get through with their work and Juliette's caprices often called for changes that took a long time to accomplish. Every day she would come back from her shopping with new ideas about the decoration of the parlor, or the dressing room. The hangings in the bedroom had to be entirely changed three times because she did not like them.