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last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics and Simplicius’ Commentary. Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.
    â€˜That’s quite enough for today,’ thought Laforgue. ‘We’re not accomplices on the strength of so little.’
    â€” How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.
    â€” As if I didn’t know! replied Laforgue.
    â€” So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn’t that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance . . .
    â€” No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She’s simpering, this is the limit.’ But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe . . .
    â€” Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.
    Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.
    Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d’Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter’s lodge.
    â€˜One’s really too polite,’ he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.’
    Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:
    â€” Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn’t go all the way!
    Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud – and he went back inside to wash his hands.
    This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.
    At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.
    Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage’s lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.
    â€˜What a dreadful creature!’ thought Laforgue in his bed that evening, mulling over Pauline’s visit before falling asleep and thinking with some distress that he really should have had her. ‘I don’t like this little war of escapes, these solitary pleasures. Let’s hurry up and be done with onanism for two.’
    He is a bit quick to generalize his own experiences. The fact is, he knows only whores or young girls, no women: which amounts to saying he