In the private rooms of restaurants, where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the motley crowd of men of letters and actresses.

They were prodigal as kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy.

This was an existence outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of storms, having something of the sublime.

For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent.

The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them.
All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions.