Their frames seemed deprived of muscles and nerves, and their embarrassment and anxiety increased.

They felt ashamed of remaining so silent and gloomy face to face with one another.

They would have liked to have had the strength to squeeze each other to death, so as not to pass as idiots in their own eyes.
What! they belonged one to the other, they had killed a man, and played an atrocious comedy in order to be able to love in peace, and they sat there, one on either side of a mantelshelf, rigid, exhausted, their minds disturbed and their frames lifeless! Such a denouement appeared to them horribly and cruelly ridiculous.

It was then that Laurent endeavoured to speak of love, to conjure up the remembrances of other days, appealing to his imagination for a revival of his tenderness.
"Therese," he said, "don't you recall our afternoons in this room?
Then I came in by that door, but today I came in by this one.

We are free now.