"It is abominable! I do not wish a cocotte to throw her foot on my neck when I am thinking of eternity. What confounded tastes you have! Immediately after leaving Lili Kerth to play that divine Bach. Nonsense! mixture! I am not a monk, far from it—but such shaking up in one bottle of the profane and the sacred, no, that is vileness swaddled in art. Yes, yes, I beg forgiveness once more, but in the Holy Scriptures something is said about a gold ring in a pig's nose. Voila!"
The baron smiled under his ruddy mustache and said, after a while:
"That is subtle and not to be understood by everyone. Bach after Lili Kerth—that is the bite, that is the irony of things. Do you know Baudelaire's quatrain?"
He stood up, and, without declamation, even carelessly, through his nose and teeth, gave the quatrain:
"Quand chez le debauche l'aube blanche et vermeil,
Entre en societe de l'Ideal rongeur,
Par l'operation d'un mystere vengeur,
Dans la brute assoupie un Ange se reveille."
With his hands in the pockets of his flannel sack he paced through the room.
Maryan had translated that quatrain quite beautifully. Without interrupting his pacing he repeated the translation.