The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 3 (of 8) eBook
Guy de Maupassant
As soon as they were in the room, she undressed herself
quickly, and retired without saying a word, and then
she waited for him, cowering against the wall.
But she was as simple as it was possible for a provincial
lawyer’s wife to be, and he was more exacting
than a pascha with three tails, and so they did not
at all understand each other. At last, however,
he went to sleep, and the night passed, and the silence
was only disturbed by the tick-tack of the clock,
and she, lying motionless, thought of her conjugal
nights; and by the light of the Chinese lantern, she
looked, nearly heart-broken, at the little fat man
lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the
bed-clothes like a balloon filled with gas. He
snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with
prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs
profited by his sleep, to stand up in a very strange
way, as if they were tired of having been fastened
for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were
trying to cover, and a small stream of saliva was running
out of one corner of his half-open mouth.
At last the daylight appeared through the drawn blinds;
so she got up and dressed herself without making any
noise, and she had already half opened the door, when
she made the lock creak, and he woke up and rubbed
his eyes. He was some moments before he quite
came to himself, and then, when he remembered all
that had happened, he said: “What!
Are you going already?” She remained standing,
in some confusion, and then she said, in a hesitating
voice: “Yes, of course; it is morning...”
Then he sat up, and said: “Look here, I
have something to ask you, in my turn.”
And as she did not reply, he went on: “You
have surprised me most confoundedly since yesterday.
Be open, and tell me why you did it all, for upon
my word I cannot understand it in the least.”
She went close up to him, blushing like as if she
had been a virgin, and said: “I wanted
to know ... what ... what vice ... really was, ...
and ... well ... well, it is not at all funny.”
And she ran out of the room, and downstairs into the
street.
A number of sweepers were busy in the streets, brushing
the pavements, the roadway, and sweeping everything
on one side. With the same regular motion, the
motion of mowers in a meadow, they pushed the mud in
front of them in a semi-circle, and she met them in
every street, like dancing puppets, walking automatically
with their swaying motion. And it seemed to her
as if something had been swept out of her; as if her
over-excited dreams had been pushed into the gutter,
or into the drain, and so she went home, out of breath,
and very cold, and all that she could remember was
the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping
the streets of Paris in the early morning.
As soon as she got into her room, she threw herself
onto her bed and cried.
