"You ... you ... all the time it is you," she cried, passionately. "And what about myself; must not I begin over again, too?"
"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words. He longed intensely to be away from her now, to be out in the open street where he could think. This room was stifling. He went through the horrid methodical business of parting as if it were all a dream. He remembered glancing at the clock in a casual way, and saying, "I'd better be going"; he remembered the ludicrous search for one glove, he murmuring that it didn't really matter, and she insisting on a search with aching minuteness....
He never saw her again; her life had impinged on his, and left its impression, as many others had done. He did not regret her as he had regretted Lilian, for she had outraged his self-respect, and left him abashed and humbled.
VII
He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.
At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages—making one cask into a dozen—so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs—but without bread to give to their children.
Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade them stop.
For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths. Odd stories of the despair of love—sick peasantry at postponed weddings—filled the papers; the Assiette au Beurre published a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in Paris—but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand vignerons were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....