So he paced the streets or visited his friends and the _Revue spéculative_, a pale melancholy upon him like the vegetation of a cave. Under the shadow of a strong habit which no disturbance could uproot, he still worked in the mornings, but he shortened the hours, impatient for his distracting strolls. His imagination no longer accompanied him. It seemed that in ever projecting his thought towards an external creature, he had proportionately diminished the intensity of his evocative faculty. As he was leaving the _Revue_, after Fortier had told him that the countess, now installed in her home because of affairs, was receiving some friends on a certain evening, at nine o'clock, he discovered that the present day was Wednesday, the day in question. "Perhaps I will find Sixtine there?" This quite natural reflection guided his somnambulism towards Marigny Avenue. In the interval he had dressed and dined with a perfect unconsciousness. A system of newly organized revery relieved the slow and rude friction of transitions; furnished with a problem of metaphysics, commerce, art, politics, it mattered not what so long as it required shrewd deductions, he used to be so perfectly absorbed in them that the hours vainly pricked him with their pins, the minutes. He walked through the streets insentient, inexistent. But, involuntarily, this action of his mind which shut him in between the walls of the fixed idea was a grievous imprisonment against which his will rebelled; on the other hand, chosen and brought about in entire freedom, this incarceration saved him, without the tax of suffering, from the ennui of expectation. Nothing was so painful to him as changes of rhythm. He wished them to be abrupt or imperceptible, partaking of a sudden brutality or of an infinitesimal gentleness, the unity of force sustained with all its initial violence or decomposed into the infinity of its diminishing fractions. Leibnitz had taught him the arithmetical method of reducing the sensation of time to an evanescent progression: he applied the method to life. To live and not to be aware of living was an ideal to which his senses, deceivers, but unrelenting, too often barred the road. Today the obstacle had been surmounted. In the small modern room on the ground floor there were many people: some raised their heads when his name was announced; the usual movements and whisperings: "An Entragues?" "Which Entragues?" "Oh! some stray stem of an Entragues! The name is quite common in the South." "Yet he carries himself well." "The countess will tell us about him." As soon as he was freed from the ceremonial of introduction, Entragues sought the eyes of some friend with whom he could be at ease. He found Sixtine's eyes: a gesture beckoned him. He obeyed without astonishment, for he had seen a chair near her, guarded by a fan.