From that time forward Charles became for him an object of continual conversation. He dragged him in on all possible occasions, speaking of him as "Poor Charles," with an air of infinite pity. When he returned home from the office, where he had been accosted twice or thrice as Forestier, he avenged himself by bitter railleries against the dead man in his tomb. He recalled his defects, his absurdities, his littleness, enumerating them with enjoyment, developing and augmenting them as though he had wished to combat the influence of a dreaded rival over the heart of his wife. He would say, "I say, Made, do you remember the day when that duffer Forestier tried to prove to us that stout men were stronger than spare ones?"
Then he sought to learn a number of private and secret details respecting the departed, which his wife, ill at ease, refused to tell him. But he obstinately persisted, saying, "Come, now, tell me all about it. He must have been very comical at such a time?"
She murmured, "Oh! do leave him alone."
But he went on, "No, but tell me now, he must have been a duffer to sleep with?" And he always wound up with, "What a donkey he was."
One evening, towards the end of June, as he was smoking a cigarette at the window, the fineness of the evening inspired him with a wish for a drive, and he said, "Made, shall we go as far as the Bois de Boulogne?"
"Certainly."
They took an open carriage and drove up the Champs Elysées, and then along the main avenue of the Bois de Boulogne. It was a breezeless night, one of those stifling nights when the overheated air of Paris fills the chest like the breath of a furnace. A host of carriages bore along beneath the trees a whole population of lovers. They came one behind the other in an unbroken line. George and Madeleine amused themselves with watching all these couples, the woman in summer toilet and the man darkly outlined beside her. It was a huge flood of lovers towards the Bois, beneath the starry and heated sky. No sound was heard save the dull rumble of wheels. They kept passing by, two by two in each vehicle, leaning back on the seat, silent, clasped one against the other, lost in dreams of desire, quivering with the anticipation of coming caresses. The warm shadow seemed full of kisses. A sense of spreading lust rendered the air heavier and more suffocating. All the couples, intoxicated with the same idea, the same ardor, shed a fever about them.
George and Madeleine felt the contagion. They clasped hands without a word, oppressed by the heaviness of the atmosphere and the emotion that assailed them. As they reached the turning which follows the line of the fortification, they kissed one another, and she stammered somewhat confusedly, "We are as great babies as on the way to Rouen."
The great flood of vehicles divided at the entrance of the wood. On the road to the lake, which the young couple were following, they were now thinner, but the dark shadow of the trees, the air freshened by the leaves and by the dampness arising from the streamlets that could be heard flowing beneath them, and the coolness of the vast nocturnal vault bedecked with stars, gave to the kisses of the perambulating pairs a more penetrating charm.
George murmured, "Dear little Made," as he pressed her to him.