An immense love, a need of voluptuousness, floated about this close nave, full of the ardent sap of the tropics. The young woman was enveloped in these mighty bridals of the earth, engendering around her this dark verdure, these colossal stems; and the acrid confinement of this candent mother, this forest-like growth, this mass of vegetation all glowing with the entrails which nourished it, surrounded her with perturbing effluvia of most intoxicating power. At her feet, the tank, the mass of warm water, thickened by the juices of the floating roots, steamed and wrapt her shoulders in a mantle of heavy vapour, a mist which heated her skin like the contact of a hand moist with voluptuousness. On her head she felt a breath from the palms as the tall leaves sprinkled their aroma. And more than the close warmth of the atmosphere, than the bright lights, than the large dazzling flowers resembling faces laughing or grimacing amongst the foliage, the odours especially overpowered her. An undefinable perfume, powerful and exciting, hung about, composed of a thousand others: human perspiration, women's breaths, the scent of hair; and zephyrs sweet and insipid almost to faintness, were blended with coarse and pestilential smells loaded with poison. But amidst this strange amalgamation of odours, the one which dominated all, stifling the delicateness of the vanilla and the sharpness of the orchids, was that penetrating, sensual, human odour, that odour of love which escapes of a morning from the closed chamber of a young married couple. Renée had slowly leant against the granite pedestal. In her green satin dress, with her face and shoulders of a rosy hue and sparkling with the pure scintillations of her diamonds, she resembled some great pink and green flower, one of the Nymphæa of the tank, swooning from the heat. At this hour of clear vision, all her good resolutions vanished for ever, the intoxication of the dinner regained possession of her faculties, imperious, triumphant, and rendered mightier than before by the flames of the conservatory. She no longer remembered the chill night air which had calmed her, nor those murmuring shadows of the park, the voices of which had counselled a happy peacefulness. Her ardent woman's senses, her satiated woman's capriciousness, were aroused. And, above her, the great black marble sphinx laughed a mysterious laugh, as though it had read the at length expressed desired which was galvanizing this dead heart, the desire which had remained so long elusive, the "something else" so vainly sought by Renée amidst the oscillating motion of her carriage, in the ashy gloom of the gathering night, and which had been so abruptly revealed to her beneath the glaring light of this garden of fire by the sight of Louise and Maxime, laughing and playing together, hand in hand. At this moment a sound of voices issued from a neighbouring arbour, where Aristide Saccard had led the Messieurs Mignon and Charrier.