Five minutes later I longed to put on my things and get away. But this terrible languor that had overcome me at home took possession of me again, and deprived me of energy enough to move and I stayed in spite of the disgust that I felt for this association. The unusual attractiveness that I supposed I had discovered in this creature over there under the chandeliers of the theater had altogether vanished on closer acquaintance, and she was nothing more to me now than a common woman, like all the others, whose indifferent and complaisant kiss smacked of garlic. I thought I would say something. “Have you lived here long?” I asked. “Over six months on the fifteenth of January.” “Where were you before that?” “In the Rue Clauzel. But the janitor made me very uncomfortable and I left.” And she began to tell me an interminable story of a janitor who had talked scandal about her. But, suddenly, I heard something moving quite close to us. First there was a sigh, then a slight, but distinct, sound as if some one had turned round on a chair. I sat up abruptly and asked. “What was that noise?” She answered quietly and confidently: “Do not be uneasy, my dear boy, it is my neighbor. The partition is so thin that one can hear everything as if it were in the room. These are wretched rooms, just like pasteboard.” I felt so lazy that I paid no further attention to it. We resumed our conversation. Driven by the stupid curiosity that prompts all men to question these creatures about their first experiences, to attempt to lift the veil of their first folly, as though to find in them a trace of pristine innocence, to love them, possibly, in a fleeting memory of their candor and modesty of former days, evoked by a word, I insistently asked her about her earlier lovers. I knew she was telling me lies. What did it matter? Among all these lies I might, perhaps, discover something sincere and pathetic. “Come,” said I, “tell me who he was.” “He was a boating man, my dear.” “Ah! Tell me about it. Where were you?” “I was at Argenteuil.” “What were you doing?” “I was waitress in a restaurant.” “What restaurant?” “'The Freshwater Sailor.' Do you know it?” “I should say so, kept by Bonanfan.” “Yes, that's it.” “And how did he make love to you, this boating man?” “While I was doing his room. He took advantage of me.” But I suddenly recalled the theory of a friend of mine, an observant and philosophical physician whom constant attendance in hospitals has brought into daily contact with girl-mothers and prostitutes, with all the shame and all the misery of women, of those poor women who have become the frightful prey of the wandering male with money in his pocket.