And she herself was growing old. She was growing old, never having known a thing about life beyond the hideously banal monotony of regularly performed duties which, by all accounts, was what happily married life consisted of. She was still pretty. The uneventful life she lived had preserved her like a winter apple in an attic. Yet she was consumed from within by unspoken and obsessive desires. She wondered if she would die without ever having tasted the wicked delights which life had to offer, without ever, not even once, having plunged into the ocean of voluptuous pleasure which, to her, was Paris.

After long and careful preparation, she decided to put into action a plan to get there. She invented a pretext, got herself invited by some relatives and, since her husband was unable to accompany her, left for the city alone. The alleged discovery of some long-lost friends living in one of its leafy suburbs enabled her as soon as she arrived to prolong her stay by a couple of days or rather nights, if necessary. Her search began. Up and down the boulevards she walked, seeing nothing particularly wicked or sinful.

She cast her eye inside all the well-known cafés, and each morning her avid reading of the Figaro’s lonely hearts’ column was a fresh reminder to her of the call of love. But she found nothing that might lead her to the great orgies she imagined actresses and artists enjoyed all the time. Nowhere could she discover the dens of iniquity about which she had dreamed. Without the necessary ‘Open Sesame’ she remained debarred from Ali Baba’s cave. Uninitiated, she stood on the threshold of the catacombs where the secret rites of a forbidden religion were performed. Her petty bourgeois relatives could offer her an introduction to none of the fashionable men whose names buzzed in her ears. In despair, she had almost decided to give up when, finally, happy chance intervened.

One day, as she was walking down the Chaussée d’Antin,1 she stopped to look at the window of a shop selling Japanese bibelots2 in such gay, cheerful colours as to delight the eye. She was looking thoughtfully at its amusing little ivories, its huge oriental vases of vivid enamelwork and its strange bronzes, when she heard from within the voice of the proprietor. With low, reverential bows, he was showing a fat, bald-headed little man with grizzled stubble the figure of a pot-bellied Buddha, the only one of its kind, or so he claimed.

With each of the merchant’s utterances, the famous name of his customer sounded like a clarion call in her ears. The other browsers, young ladies and elegant gentlemen, cast oblique, highly respectful glances in the direction of the well-known author who was absorbed in his examination of the figure. One was as ugly as the other. The pair might have been taken for brothers.