Jules had always frequented whorehouses and he had to admit it had not been the same for a number of years now. The notion of a seminal drain where one would go to satisfy one’s physiological needs was no longer alluring. The modern man was looking for new offerings; he wanted to be listened to, he was looking for Love. Everyone wanted their working-class girl, their own little grisette, fourteen to nineteen years old, in her cheap furnished apartment, and preferably with her mother around to keep her clean. As for the brothels, with their trinkets and chinoiseries, their wall hangings and their scrubbed girls, they had become so desperately petty bourgeois. Jules found it all profoundly unappealing, rugged man that he was, used to the virile atmosphere of the garrison.

His thing was the streetwalkers: those grubby girls who would stand next to building sites and vacant lots and lift their petticoats in the shadow of the walls of Paris. Their animal odour, their slovenliness, reminded him of his own primitive self, his lost barbarism. Girls like that were to be found everywhere in Brest, by the hundreds even, in the Seven-Saints quarter or perched on the ramparts. They were even in the fields, where they set up signs with their name. He was especially fond of the girls from Léon. Their earthiness, their simple nature so characteristic of Bretonne peasant girls and accentuated by the fact they understood barely three words of French; all of it he found enormously exciting. He also found them more spontaneous, less mechanical than the Parisian girls, who made it a point of honour to let you know how bored they were while you were screwing them. A Léon girl, for her part, displayed an apparently sincere erotic delight. And all that quite cheaply. No, truly, Jules was keeping himself most entertained.

At the end of his three weeks of debauchery, a letter that had been left for him at the hotel’s reception called Jules to task: What progress has there been in the purchase of Auguste’s replacement? he was being asked by his father-in-law.

It wasn’t like him, but it was true that in this affair he was dragging his feet.