Towards two o'clock, he resisted Calixte Heliot who discreetly tried to draw him away. Later, he saw Moscowitch, after consulting his watch, disappear into the antechamber. Sixtine brushed past him at the same instant; she turned around, chattering, on the arm of Renaudeau, who seemed to be telling her something malicious. For an hour, perhaps more, he remained in the same place, alone and motionless, watching her pass from hand to hand, carefree and smiling. He watched with an empty brain, rendered anaemic by the late hour, fuddled by the incessant bustle. Finally the rooms began to thin. While he was hesitating to offer himself to Sixtine as an escort, she vanished, flying, without turning her head, like a woman quite decided to refuse or to accept only with boredom and bad grace the arm of a man. He suffered her to leave, went to compliment the countess, bowed to the young girl who gave him her hand, drank a last glass of punch, so as to be less affected by the morning chill, then departed in his turn and returned on foot to his dwelling. CHAPTER XXXIV POETIC RAPTURE "Quand le monde fait peur, quand la foule fatigue. Quand le coeur n' a qu'un cri:--Te voir, te voir, te voir!" Mme. Desbordes-Valmore. He rose late, enjoying, through the window whose curtains were lifted, the wintry charm of a pale noon sun, and delighting in the state of half-consciousness which follows, after an irregular night, an extremely physical fatigue. His anaemia of a transplanted plant, combatted and almost vanquished by a regime that was country-like, returned on such mornings. He felt the languor of the consumptive and the melancholia of the adolescent. The substantial breakfast arranged by his maid was less a comfort to his fatigued organs than an intoxication. The smoking of a single cigarette turned his head: he acquired, without having sought it, an exquisite beatitude. It was like a new condition of animated matter: the dissolving state--a special enjoyment reserved for lazy sleepers and late breakfasters. Brief, like all delights, it was not long in waning, but it was transformed gradually into an agreeable sensation of peace. Then, stretching an arm towards his Gothic Bible, he removed the copper clasp and read, in a cloud of blue smoke, drinking strong coffee in little sips, the aphorisms of Ecclesiastes. A reading decidedly proper to lift a wise man far above other men, a cup where one drinks sheer emptiness as surely as in a cupule of lotus, ah! ideal banalities, written, without a doubt, for the days that follow festivals. FORTITUDE "Poverty, labor, bodily miseries, bleeding heart wounds, bitterness of bread and wine, "Repose, suppleness, flowerings, embraces, warmth of joyous repasts, "And all, and all vibrations. "The cerebral enlightenment: "All this indifferent to us, from the commencement to the end,