He would have liked to kill her now, to stab her, so as not to be forced to make her suffer otherwise. Her eyes were closed, and a little tear half opened them to make its way out, moistening the sidepiece of her mask. One would have said that it was the mask that was weeping. Her breasts were erect in a joy or a suffering that was no longer terrestrial. André wanted to get up, to stop, or break the phonograph, to seize the vase and smash its glass horn. He noticed, and was surprised that he hadn’t remembered them earlier, within reach of his arm, by the bed, the accessories of his cast-off, comic-opera “Indian’s” clothing. He threw the tomahawk which, naturally enough, he didn’t know how to throw, and it hit the back of the chair with its noncutting edge, showing contempt for all Fenimore Cooper’s tales. Next he threw one of Ellen’s slippers, which was a more deadly weapon; it struck the edge of the crystal corolla, which vibrated, without either breaking or being upset, and it also swept away all the last roses, which fell to the ground. Everything that we have just taken such a long time to describe happened while the two notes la and so, which corresponded to the two syllables of mo-ore, were being played.

The horn of the phonograph looked like the shining, menacing throat of a snake, no longer hidden beneath the flowers, and Andre, under the spell, had to obey the order. His member, like himself, also had to obey the order; the monster ordered, in a limpid and piercing voice:

At the third figure of the dance

The fair maid fell down dead,

O sweetest nightingale!

At the third figure of the dance

The fair maid fell down de. . .

André didn’t hear the final hiccup: a tremendous, high-pitched cry, made up of seven cries, had burst from the women’s gallery, where the faces suddenly abandoned the window. The spell was broken, and André got up, without having followed the maniac impulse through to the end. . .The phonograph gave a final krr and stopped. It was just like the release of an alarm clock, although it was not the end of a dream. The cold, blue dawn of the second day that they had been there let its shroud fall, from the tall windows of the hall, onto the divan. Ellen was no longer breathing, her heart was no longer beating, her feet and hands were as glacial as the dawn.

A new Hood of baroque memories came chattering into the Supermale’s troubled brain:

“ ‘Why,’ Aristotle asks in his Problems, ‘is it not of assistance to the sexual act to have cold feet?’ ”