In her discouragement, she reached a point when she felt jealous of the street girls she met passing the Boulevard Saint Michel, the grisettes. There were times when she would have readily given up everything, her knowledge, her honor and that of her family. She remembered also that there had been women, famous for their wit but too ugly to be loved, who had indulged in clandestine debauchery; and she secretly read over again with a sensual shivering the historians of scandals who related such facts. Sometimes, when she returned home at dusk, she heard a man's footsteps following her. What would he do? Was he going to address her? Although she was sure she would defend herself, yet she felt almost a vain hope that he would.... One evening, in the rue de Rennes, she was emboldened to turn round: she saw an old gentleman of M. Raindal's age who smiled at her with knowing grimaces. She hurried away, stumbling, full of rage, deception and disgust with herself. She found no peace until the day was ended and she slipped into her bedsheets after blowing out her candle. There was to her no more delicious moment than this one. She lay on her back and let the tide of sleep gently come up to her. Her limbs became paralyzed; her thoughts ran into each other; she had a feeling that her body was leaving her and the darkness of night favored this reassuring mirage. Because she no longer saw her own homeliness, Mlle. Raindal gained more audacity. Her soul at last freed and naked, as it were, bravely soared away on the wings of love. Whom, then, did she invoke in her adorations? Albârt? Another man? Sleep carried her away before she could be definite, and during the hours that followed, she stretched herself out, panting in the midst of strange dreams which were forgotten the next morning. But she measured the nothingness of her days according to the feverish fullness of her nights. She was tortured throughout the mornings with the anxieties that affect old age. When would it all end? Had the valor of her heart, of her reason and of her mind forever vanished? Or would her sorrow gradually wear itself out, as it had done before, for lack of remedies and relief?... These queries filled her with anguish. She held her pillow tight against herself and crushed her lips in it, for fear they might hear her through the door, as on the occasion when M. Raindal had found her sobbing. * * * * * One afternoon, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, she was standing before an oak desk, examining the huge folio of the _Corpus inscriptionum aegyptiacarum_, when a shadow suddenly passed over the pages. She looked up and recognized Boerzell, the dismissed suitor, the young Assyriologist of the Saulvard party. Facing her, leaning on the other slope of the desk, he greeted her smilingly.