Robert longed to ask her who Lucienne and Germaine were, what they would have said to her if she had joined them in their compartment, how they would all have spent a day which would have perhaps ended, as a supreme diversion, after the pleasures of the rink, at the Olympia Tavern, if Robert and I had not been there. For a moment the purlieus of the Olympia, which until then had seemed to him merely deadly dull, aroused curiosity in him and pain, and the sunshine of this spring day beating upon the Rue Caumartin where, possibly, if she had not known Robert, Rachel might have gone in the course of the evening and have earned a louis, filled him with a vague longing. But what use was it to ply Rachel with questions when he already knew that her answer would be merely silence, or a lie, or something extremely painful for him to hear, which would yet explain nothing. The porters were shutting the doors; we jumped into a first-class carriage; Rachel’s magnificent pearls reminded Robert that she was a woman of great price, he caressed her, restored her to her place in his heart where he could contemplate her, internalised, as he had always done hitherto—save during this brief instant in which he had seen her in the Place Pigalle of an impressionist painter—and the train began to move. It was, by the way, quite true that she was “literary”. She never stopped talking to me about books, new art and Tolstoyism except to rebuke Saint-Loup for drinking so much wine: “Ah! If you could live with me for a year, we’ld see a fine change. I should keep you on water and you’ld be ever so much better.” “Right you are. Let’s begin now.” “But you know quite well I have to work all day!” For she took her art very seriously. “Besides, what would your people say?” And she began to abuse his family to me in terms which for that matter seemed to me highly reasonable, and with which Saint-Loup, while disobeying her orders in the matter of champagne, entirely concurred. I, who was so much afraid of the effect of wine on him, and felt the good influence of his mistress, was quite prepared to advise him to let his family go hang. Tears sprang to the young woman’s eyes; I had been rash enough to refer to Dreyfus. “The poor martyr!” she almost sobbed; “it will be the death of him in that dreadful place.” “Don’t upset yourself, Zézette, he will come back, he will be acquitted all right, they will admit they’ve made a mistake.” “But long before then he’ll be dead! Oh, well at any rate his children will bear a stainless name. But just think of the agony he must be going through; that’s what makes my heart bleed. And would you believe that Robert’s mother, a pious woman, says that he ought to be left on the Devil’s Isle, even if he is innocent; isn’t it appalling?” “Yes, it’s absolutely true, she does say that,” Robert assured me. “She’s my mother, I’ve no fault to find with her, but it’s quite clear she hasn’t got a sensitive nature, like Zézette.”