falls loose, flaming. He draws her to him. His head bends towards
her, and his lips are ready. His desire--the wish of all his
strength and all his life--is to caress her. He would die that he
might touch her with his lips. But she struggles, and utters a
choking cry. She is trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured
with abhorrence.

I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention
is not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished.

"Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie.

"No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered.

"Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and
he does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging,
gazing at the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick,
torn from his dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire.

I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of
breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is
bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor
Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of
time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining
strength could subdue.

The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a
barrel, has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He
disappears round the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow
as a Camembert, his scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and