He recognises us, greets us
familiarly, and asks what we are doing there. And when we invent a story
of having some urgent message to give to his relative or friend, he
assures us that nothing could be more simple, takes us in at the door, and
promises to send her down to us in five minutes. How much we love him--as
at that moment I loved Francoise--the good-natured intermediary who by a
single word has made supportable, human, almost propitious the
inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been
imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and seductive, beguiling away from
us, even making laugh at us, the woman whom we love. If we are to judge of
them by him, this relative who has accosted us and who is himself an
initiate in those cruel mysteries, then the other guests cannot be so very
demoniacal. Those inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone
to taste of unknown pleasures--behold, a breach in the wall, and we are
through it. Behold, one of the moments whose series will go to make up
their sum, a moment as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important
to ourself because our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture
it to ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have
created it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are
waiting there below.
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