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240 Commune were over, when one could pour petroleum and scatter death upon the streets! I returned home.

"Did anyone call?" I asked the caretaker.

"No, Monsieur Mintié."

"No letters either?"

"No, Monsieur Mintié."

"Are you sure nobody went up to my room while I was away?"

"The key was not touched."

I scribbled the following words on my card: "I want to see you."

"Take this over to the Rue de Balzac."

I waited in the street, impatient, nervous; the caretaker was not long in returning.

"The maid told me that Madame had not yet come back."

It was seven o'clock. I went to my room and stretched out on the sofa.

"She won't come. Where is she? What is she doing?"

I did not light the candles. The window, illuminated by the street, shone in the room with a dark glimmer, reflected a yellow shine upon the ceiling, where appeared the trembling shadow of the curtains. And the hours passed, slow and endless, so endless and so slow that one might say the flow of time had suddenly stopped.

"She won't come!"

From the street, the intermittent noise of vehicles reached me; the buses rolled heavily, the closed carriages passed by lightly and rapidly. When one of them passed close to the sidewalk or slowed down I would rush to the window, which I had left half-open, to look into the street. . . . No one alighted.

"She won't come!"

And while saying to myself: "She won't come," I