Laurence also had grown exceedingly animated. She was almost beautiful amid her unwonted excitement. Her visage had assumed a terrible expression of frankness and abandonment, which imparted to each of her features a look of the utmost insolence; her entire countenance had become lengthened; broad, square sections, crossed by deep lines, divided in a marked manner her cheeks and throat into firm and disdainful masses. She was pale, and several beads of perspiration stood on her forehead at the roots of her hair which was puffed straight up on her low, flat head. Reclining in her arm-chair, her face dead and distorted, her eyes black and glowing, she appeared to me like the frightful image of a woman who has weighed in her hand all the delights of the world and who now refuses them, finding them too light. At times, I fancied that she looked at me, shrugging her shoulders, that she smiled on me in pity, and that I heard her say to me, in a hoarse and horrid whisper: "So you love me, do you? What do you want of me? Physically I am no more than a corpse, and as for a heart, I never had one!" Pâquerette looked thinner and more wrinkled than I had ever seen her before. Her face, like a dried apple, seemed to be more wasted than usual and had acquired a faint tinge of brick red. Her eyes were no longer anything but two brilliant points. She wagged her head in a mild and amiable way, chattering like a sharp-toned bird organ. She enjoyed, besides, perfect calmness, although she alone had eaten and drunk as much as all the rest of us together. I stared at all three of them. The confusion of my brain, which exaggerated their dimensions, made them oscillate strangely before me. I said to myself that every species of dissipation was represented at this festival: youthful and careless dissipation, dissipation ripe in its frankness, dissipation which has grown old and lives amid its whitened locks on the remembrance of its follies of other days. For the first time, I saw these women together, side by side. They alone were a whole world in themselves. Pâquerette ruled, as became her old age; she presided; she called the two unfortunates who caressed her "my daughters." There was, however, intense cordiality between them; they talked to each other like sisters, without thinking of the difference in their ages. My bewildered glances confounded the three heads; I knew no longer above which forehead was the white hair. Jacques and I were opposite to these women. We were young; we were celebrating a success of intelligence. I was on the point of quitting the apartment, brothers, and running to you. Then, I indulged in a burst of laughter, a very loud one, without doubt, for the women stared at me in astonishment. I said to myself that this was the kind of society amid which I was destined, for the future, to live. I closed my eyes and saw angels, clad in long blue robes, who were ascending in a pale light, full of sparks.