Then with
brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home. The struggle within him had
wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the last forty years were
being drowned in a flood of new life. While he was passing along the
boulevards the roll of the last carriages deafened him with the name
of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs dancing before his eyes--the nude
limbs, the lithe arms, the white shoulders, of Nana. And he felt that he
was hers utterly: he would have abjured everything, sold everything, to
possess her for a single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful puberty
of early manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly
in the chaste heart of the Catholic and amid the dignified traditions of
middle age.
CHAPTER VI
Count Muffat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, had arrived
overnight at Les Fondettes, where Mme Hugon, who was staying there with
only her son Georges, had invited them to come and spend a week. The
house, which had been built at the end of the eighteenth century, stood
in the middle of a huge square enclosure. It was perfectly unadorned,
but the garden possessed magnificent shady trees and a chain of tanks
fed by running spring water. It stood at the side of the road which
leads from Orleans to Paris and with its rich verdure and high-embowered
trees broke the monotony of that flat countryside, where fields
stretched to the horizon's verge.
Pages:
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268