speak. Far from vanishing, this image, as I looked at
it, was assuming in some way a fixed corporeal form.
It grimaced, wriggled, leaped with lurid contortions,
its foul, obscene lips distended toward Juliette, who
seemed to draw the image toward herself and whose
hand sank in its hair and passed tremblingly along its
body, happy to sully herself with its impure contact. And the sordid juggler was removing Juliette's
clothes and showing her to me in a swoon, in the
wretched splendor of sin! I had to shut my eyes and
make a painful effort to dispel this abominable image,
and Juliette immediately assumed her expression of
enigmatic, candid tenderness.
"And above all, come to see me, often, very often," she said, seeing me to the door, while Spy, who had followed her into the antechamber, barked and danced on his thin, spider legs.
Outside, I felt the return of a sudden and passionate affection for Lirat and, reproaching myself for being sulky with him, I resolved to ask him to dine with me that very evening. On my way from the Rue Saint-Petersbourg to the Boulevard de Courcelles where Lirat lived, I made some bitter reflections. The visit had disillusioned me, I was no longer under the spell of a dream and I quickly returned to desolate reality, to the denial of love. What I had imagined about Juliette was quite vague.
My spirit, exalted by her beauty, was ascribing to her moral qualities and mental attainments which I could not define and which I assumed were extraordinary, the more so since Lirat, by attributing to her, without reason, a dishonorable existence and shameful proclivities, had made her a veritable martyr in my eyes, and my heart was moved. Pushing this folly still further, I thought that by some sort of irresistible sympathy she would confide her suffering to me, the
