Other women are there. Many a Sunday have I, too, joined in all that love-making.
* * * * * *
Among these beings who chat and take hold of each other, an isolated woman stands like a post, and makes an empty space around her.
It is Louise Verte. She is fearfully ugly, and she was too virtuous formerly, at a time when, so they say, she need not have been. She regrets this, and relates it without shame, in order to be revenged on virtue. She would like to have a lover, but no one wants her, because of her bony face and her scraped appearance; from a sort of eczema. Children make sport of her, knowing her needs; for the disclosures of their elders have left a stain on them. A five-year-old girl points her tiny finger at Louise and twitters, "She wants a man."
In the Place is Véron, going about aimlessly, like a dead leaf—Véron, who revolves, when he may, round Antonia. An ungainly man, whose tiny head leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a few rents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes he is overcome by attacks of compassion.
Véron and Louise Verte see one another,—and each makes a détour of avoidance. They are afraid of each other.
Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, very compassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between the turned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief,—thick as a towel,—a mournful yellow face is stuck.
I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! I feel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, wavering like ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete.
Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows stand sharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that Marie Tusson lives, whose father, a clerk at Messrs. Gozlan's, like myself, is manager of the property. I steered to this place instinctively, without confessing it to myself, brushing people and things without mingling with them.
Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just say good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.