“In the Rue Clauzel. But the janitor made me very uncomfortable and I left.”
And she began to tell me an interminable story of a janitor who had talked scandal about her.
But, suddenly, I heard something moving quite close to us. First there was a sigh, then a slight, but distinct, sound as if some one had turned round on a chair.
I sat up abruptly and asked.
“What was that noise?”
She answered quietly and confidently:
“Do not be uneasy, my dear boy, it is my neighbor. The partition is so thin that one can hear everything as if it were in the room. These are wretched rooms, just like pasteboard.”
I felt so lazy that I paid no further attention to it. We resumed our conversation. Driven by the stupid curiosity that prompts all men to question these creatures about their first experiences, to attempt to lift the veil of their first folly, as though to find in them a trace of pristine innocence, to love them, possibly, in a fleeting memory of their candor and modesty of former days, evoked by a word, I insistently asked her about her earlier lovers.
I knew she was telling me lies. What did it matter? Among all these lies I might, perhaps, discover something sincere and pathetic.
“Come,” said I, “tell me who he was.”