I'd better try and find out whom he has been seeing recently.

But as a physician he meets scores of people! And then, how can I explain to him?
Tell him the story?
He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got halfway through the narrative." And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place.

He was burning for this unknown woman.

He was positively obsessed by her.

He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to believe--in the teeth of all experience, in the teeth of good judgment--that with a woman as passionate as this one seemed to be, he would experience superhuman sensations and novel abandon.
And he imagined her as he would have her, blonde, firm of flesh, lithe, feline, melancholy, capable of frenzies; and the picture of her brought on such a tension of nerves that his teeth rattled.
For a week, in the solitude in which he lived, he had dreamed of her and had become thoroughly aroused and incapable of doing any work, even of reading, for the image of this woman interposed itself between him and the page.
He tried suggesting to himself ignoble visions.