"'Have you forgotten that this is the day, at the _Hotel de Bade_, between five and six o'clock? In an hour, Madame de Lauriere will be at the office of the Police Commissary in the Rue de Provence, with her uncle and Maitre Cantenac ...' "An hour; I only had an hour, sixty short minutes to dress in, to take a room, find a woman and persuade her to go with me immediately, and to excite her feelings, so that this extravagant adventure might not appear too equivocal to the Commissary of Police. One hour in which to carry out such a program was enough to make a man lose his head. And there were no possible means of putting off that obligatory entertainment, to let Madame Le Lauriere know in time, and to gain a few minutes more. "'Have you found a woman, at any rate?' Maitre de Chevrier continued anxiously. "'No, my dear sir!' "I immediately began to think of the whole string of my dear female friends. Should I choose Liline Ablette, who could refuse me nothing, Blanch Rebus, who was the best comrade a man ever had, or Lalie Spring, that luxurious creature, who was constantly in search of something new? Neither one nor the other of them, for it was ninety-nine chances to one that all these confounded girls were in the _Bois de Boulogne_, or at their dressmakers!" "'Bah! Just pick up the first girl you meet on the pavement.' "And before the hour was up, I was bolting the door of a room, which looked out onto the boulevard. "The woman whom I had picked up, as she was walking past the _cafes_, from the _Vaudeville_ to _Tortoni's_, was twenty at the most. She had an impudent, snub nose, as if it had been turned up in fun by a fillip, large eyes with-deep rims round them; her lips were too red, and she had the slow, indolent walk of a girl who goes in for debauchery too freely and who began too soon, but she was pretty, and her linen was very clean and neat. And she was evidently used to chance love-making, and had a way of undressing herself in two or three rapid movements, of throwing her toggery to the right and left, until she was extremely lightly clad, and of throwing herself onto the bed which astonished me as a sight that was well worth seeing. "She did not talk much, though she began by saying: 'Pay up at once, old man ... You don't look like a fellow who would bilk a girl, but it puts me into better trim when I have been paid.' "I gave her two napoleons, and she eyed me with gratitude and respect at the same time, but also with that uneasy look of a girl who asks herself: 'What does this tool expect for it?' "The whole affair began to amuse me, and I must confess that I was rather taken with her, for she had a beautiful figure and complexion, and I was hoping that the Commissary would not come directly, when there was a loud rapping at the door. "She sat up with a start, and grew so pale that one would have said she was about to faint.