Mme Sidonie uttered a cry of delight when she saw Renée open the discreetly curtained door of her shop. She was there by chance, on the point of rushing out to court, where she had summoned one of her clients to appear before a justice of the peace. She would miss her day in court; that case could wait until another day, because she was too pleased that her sister-in-law had been so kind as to call on her at last. Renée smiled and looked embarrassed. Mme Sidonie insisted that she come upstairs and led her by way of the small staircase up to the bedroom after removing the brass knob from the shop door. She removed and replaced this knob, which was held in place by a single pin, twenty times a day.

“Now, my beauty,” she said after inviting Renée to sit on a chaise longue, “now we can have a nice chat. . . . You know, you’ve come at just the right moment. I intended to call on you this evening.”

Renée, who was familiar with this bedroom, felt a vague sense of unease, like a hiker who notices that a patch of forest has been cut from a familiar landscape.

“Oh!” she said after a while. “You moved the bed, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” came the milliner’s calm answer. “One of my customers thought it was much better facing the fireplace. She also advised me to get red curtains.”

“That’s just what I was thinking. The curtains weren’t that color before. . . . A very common color, red.”

She put on her glasses and examined the room, which had a sort of boardinghouse luxury. On the mantelpiece she saw long hairpins that surely didn’t come from Mme Sidonie’s small bun. In the place where the bed had been, the wallpaper was all scuffed, discolored, and dirty from the mattress. The businesswoman had tried to hide this eyesore behind two armchairs, but the backs of the chairs were rather low, and Renée’s eyes lingered on the worn strip of wallpaper.

“You have something to say to me?” she finally asked.

“Yes, it’s quite a long story,” Mme Sidonie replied, clasping her hands and making an expression like a gourmet about to recount what she had for dinner. “Guess what. M. de Saffré is in love with beautiful Mme Saccard. . . . Yes, my darling, with you.”

Renée avoided any affectation of modesty.

“What!” she exclaimed. “You told me he was so taken with Mme Michelin.”

“Oh, that’s over, completely over! . . . I can give you proof, if you like. . . . Perhaps you didn’t know that Baron Gouraud took a shine to the Michelin girl? It’s quite baffling. Everyone who knows the baron is flabbergasted by it. . . . And did you know that she’s working on getting her husband a red ribbon? . . . A spirited girl, that one. Nothing frightens her, and she doesn’t need anyone to draw her pictures.”

She pronounced the last sentence with a mixture of regret and admiration.

“But to get back to M. de Saffré. . . . He claims to have run into you at a theatrical party wrapped up in a domino, and he even accuses himself of having rather cavalierly invited you out to supper. . . . Is there any truth to that?”

Renée was floored by this news.

“Quite true,” she murmured. “But who could have told him?”

“He claims to have recognized you afterward, once you had left the room, and he remembered seeing you go out on Maxime’s arm. . . . And since then he’s been madly in love. A fantasy has taken root in his heart, you see. . . . He came and asked me to apologize to you on his behalf.”

“Well, then, tell him that I forgive him,” Renée interrupted without taking stock of what she was saying.

Then, remembering all her woes, she went on. “You’re a good woman, Sidonie, and I’m in agony. I absolutely must have 50,000 francs by tomorrow morning. I came here to discuss the matter with you. You know people who lend money, you said?”

Annoyed by the brusque way in which her sister-in-law had cut her story short, the businesswoman made her wait a bit for an answer.

“Yes, of course. Only I advise you first and foremost to look to your friends. . . . If I were in your position, I know what I’d do. . . . I’d quite simply go to M. de Saffré.”

Renée gave a forced smile. “But that would hardly be proper,” she replied, “if as you say he’s so much in love.”

The old woman stared at her hard. Then her pudgy face gently softened into a smile of tender pity.

“Poor dear,” she murmured. “You’ve been crying. Don’t deny it. I see it in your eyes. Be strong, accept life as it is. . . . Come, let me arrange the little matter we’ve been discussing.”

Renée got up, wringing her hands so that her gloves made a crinkling sound. And she remained standing, badly shaken by a cruel inner struggle. She was on the point of parting her lips, perhaps to indicate her acceptance, when a bell rang in the next room. Mme Sidonie rushed out, leaving the door open just enough to reveal two rows of pianos. The young woman then heard a man’s step and muffled echoes of a whispered conservation. Without thinking, she went over to examine the yellow stain the mattress had left on the wall. That stain annoyed her, irritated her. Forgetting everything— Maxime, the 50,000 francs, M. de Saffré—she walked back around the bed, thinking, “It went much better where it was before. Some women truly have no taste. Lying this way you’re bound to have the light in your eyes.” A vague image rose from the depths of her memory, an image of the stranger from the Quai Saint-Paul and of a romance that had consisted of just two encounters—a chance affair she had savored in this very room, with the bed in the other place. All that remained of that affair was that worn spot on the wallpaper. The room now made her very uneasy, and she grew impatient at the continuing buzz of voices from the adjoining room.

When Mme Sidonie returned, carefully opening the door and closing it again, she repeatedly signaled with her fingers that Renée should speak in a low voice. Then she whispered in her ear, “You’ll never guess, but you’re in luck. M. de Saffré is here.”

“You didn’t tell him that I was here, did you?” the young woman asked anxiously.

The businesswoman looked surprised and, feigning innocence, answered, “Why, yes, I did. . . . He’s waiting for me to invite him in. Of course I didn’t say anything about the 50,000 francs.”

Renée, who had turned quite pale, straightened as if lashed by a whip. Her pride returned with a vengeance. The sound of boots in the next room, now ominously brutal, exasperated her. “I’m leaving,” she announced curtly. “Come open the door for me.”

Mme Sidonie attempted to smile. “Don’t be childish. . . . I can’t stay here with this boy on my hands now that I’ve told him you were here. . . . You’re really putting me in an awkward position.”

But the young woman had already started down the stairs. Standing in front of the closed door of the shop, she repeatedly cried, “Open it for me! Open it!”

The milliner was in the habit of putting the knob in her pocket after removing it from the door. She wanted the discussion to continue. Finally giving way to anger herself and displaying in the depths of her gray eyes the bitter desiccation of her nature, she shouted, “But what do you want me to tell this man?”

“That I’m not for sale,” Renée answered, with one foot already on the sidewalk. And as the door shut violently behind her, she thought she heard Mme Sidonie mutter, “Get out then, whore. You’ll pay for this.”

“My God!” the young woman thought as she climbed back into her coupé. “Even my husband is preferable to that.”

She drove straight back to the house. That night she told Maxime not to come. She felt ill and needed rest, she said. And the next day, when she handed him the 15,000 francs for Sylvia’s jeweler, his astonishment and questions embarrassed her. She said that her husband had done a nice stroke of business. From that day forward, however, she behaved more oddly than before, often changing the times of her rendezvous with Maxime and even waiting in the conservatory to send him away. He, for his part, worried little about these mood changes. He delighted in obeying women’s whims. What annoyed him more was the moral tone that their amorous encounters sometimes took. She became quite sad, and on occasion tears welled up in her eyes. She gave up singing the number about “the handsome young man” from La Belle Hélène, played hymns she had learned at boarding school, and asked her lover if he didn’t believe that evil was punished sooner or later.