"'We'll meet again soon—by-bye, darling—by-bye.'
"I heard her answering:
"'Till Tuesday.'
"I was on the dark staircase, which I descended, groping my way down.
"When I got into the open air, I saw that it was raining, and I started at a great pace down some street or other.
"I walked straight on, stupefied, distracted, trying to jog my memory! Was this possible? Yes. I remembered all of a sudden a girl who had written to me, about a month after our rupture, that she was going to have a child by me. I had torn or burned the letter, and had forgotten all about the matter. I should have looked at the woman's photograph over the girl's mantelpiece. But would I have recognized it? It was the photograph of an old woman, it seemed to me.
"I reached the quay. I saw a bench, and sat down on it. It went on raining. People passed from time to time under umbrellas. Life appeared to me odious and revolting, full of miseries, of shames, of infamies deliberate or unconscious. My daughter!... I had just perhaps possessed my own daughter! And Paris, this vast Paris, somber, mournful, dirty, sad, black, with all those houses shut up, was full of such things, adulteries, incests, violated children, I recalled to mind what I had been told about bridges haunted by the infamous votaries of vice.
"I had acted, without wishing it, without being aware of it, in a worse fashion than these ignoble beings. I had entered my own daughter's bed!
"I was on the point of throwing myself into the water. I was mad! I wandered about till dawn, then I came back to my own house to think.
"I thereupon did what appeared to me the wisest thing. I desired a notary to send for this little girl, and to ask her under what conditions her mother had given her the portrait of him whom she supposed to be her father, stating that he was intrusted with this duty by a friend.