Unconsciously I listened for a moment longer. I stretched out my hand to clasp hers and felt instead a metal object, the lamp which was left for her every evening. A match was struck, a hasty step sounded, and another door, the staircase door, closed. That was all, so I went towards home in the pale moonlight along streets deserted except for a few stray cats and dogs, a few policemen on their beats, a belated cab, and a group of young artists just leaving a café in the Boulevard Saint Michel, which were the only things which testified to the existence of life in the great sleeping mansions, dark convents, the little houses with a single jet of gas burning, and the black, sinister-looking hospitals. This quarter is really one of the suburbs of Paris, though it is so near the densely populated Boulevards, just as Camille’s peaceful life with her mother is so near her passionate stage life. It had only taken us three quarters of an hour to return from the theatre, though our pace was unequal, sometimes slow and sometimes rapid, as if we were hastening over our confidences. It took me less time to reach the little house on the Boulevard des Invalides where I live, though I wandered aimlessly in this deserted part overwhelmed by a trouble for which I could scarcely blame myself. That sudden burning of the inner being, that handling and interminable repetition of phrases which one has just heard, that obsession of thought at the same time pleasing and terrifying, that occupation as if by force by a creature to whom one was the previous evening and the same day a perfect stranger—these are the signs which denote the fatal fever, malaria of the soul, which takes longer to cure than other and more dangerous maladies. “A good night’s sleep,” I said to myself, “and to-morrow these foolish ideas will be gone; besides she is a friend’s mistress. I know myself. The thought of their caresses simply would prevent me from becoming amorous of her, if I desired to. But I shall not have this desire. She has moved me this evening in her real life as she moved me at the theatre, as she would have moved me in a novel. But that is pure imagination. To-morrow I shall not think of her, and if I think of her, I shall not see her nor Molan again. That is all.”