On rainy evenings, when the dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odor suggestive of a great untidy bed, she knew that the soft weather and the fetid reek of the town's holes and corners were sure to send the men mad.

And so she watched the best dressed among them, for she knew by their pale eyes what their state was.

On such nights it was as though a fit of fleshly madness were passing over Paris.

The girl was rather nervous certainly, for the most modish gentlemen were always the most obscene.

All the varnish would crack off a man, and the brute beast would show itself, exacting, monstrous in lust, a past master in corruption.