“This was funnier than all the rest, and under any other circumstances it would have been repugnant to me to mix up our servants in the affair like so many others do, or to distress that pretty little, fair and delicate Parisian woman, even though it were only in appearance and to pass as a common Sganarelle with the manners of a carter, in the eyes of some scoundrel of a footman, or of some lady’s maid.  And so when Maitre Le Chevrier, that kind lawyer who certainly knows more female secrets than the most fashionable confessor, gave a startled exclamation on seeing me still in my dressing-gown, and slowly smoking a cigar like an idler who has no engagements down on his tablets, and who is quietly waiting for the usual time for dressing and going to dine at his club, he exclaimed: 

“’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.