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neighbor, scrambling to his feet, clicked his heels and almost split himself in two bidding O good-bye. A sudden jolt of the train made him lose his balance and sent him sprawling back into his seat. O could not keep from laughing. Was she surprised when Sir Stephen-who had completely ignored her since the start of the journey-had her bend down over the suitcases piled pell-mell on the compartment seat, virtually the minute they were back inside, and raised her pleated skirt? She was delighted, and grateful. To anyone who might have seen her in this position, kneeling on the compartment seat, her breasts crushed against the baggage, completely dressed, but offering, between the hem of her suitcoat and her stockings, and the black garter belt to which they were fastened, her bare buttocks crisscrossed with leatherlike stripes, to anyone who might have seen her thus she could only have seemed ridiculous, and she was well aware of it. She could never help remembering, whenever she was thus made to lie prone, the disturbing, but also the humiliating and ridiculous aspect of the expression “lift your skirt,” even more humiliating than that other expression which Sir Stephen, as Ren=E9 before him, employed at least each time he offered her to someone. This feeling of humiliation that Sir Stephen, or rather Sir Stephen’s words, caused her each time he uttered them, was soothing to her. But this sweetness was as nothing compared to the happiness, mixed with pride, one might almost say with glory that overwhelmed her whenever he deigned to seize and possess her, whenever he found her body to his liking sufficiently to enter it and, for a fleeting moment, dwell therein; it seemed to O that no submission, no humiliation, would ever compensate him fairly for these precious moments.
    All the time he held her transfixed, poised against him and jostled gently by the movement of the train, she moaned. It was only when the cars collided noisily against each other, as the train ground to a halt at the Gare de Lyon, that he slipped from her and told her to straighten up.

V
    As they emerged from the station onto the cobblestone courtyard, from which the stairways descend to street level and which serves as a parking lot, a young man dressed in the uniform of a noncommissioned Air Force officer stepped forward from where he was standing near a black Citro=EBn, which was locked, as soon as he saw Sir Stephen. He saluted, opened the door, and stood aside. When O was settled in the back seat, with the baggage in the front seat, Sir Stephen bent down just long enough to kiss her hand and smile, before closing the door. He had said nothing to her, neither “Goodbye’ nor “I’ll see you in a few days,” nor even “Goodbye forever.” O had thought that he was going to join her in the back seat. The car started off so suddenly and at such speed that she did not have the presence of mind to call out to him, and although she threw herself against the back window in an effort to make some kind of sign to him, it was too late: his back was already turned to her and he was giving some instructions to his porter. Suddenly, like someone removing a bandage from a wound, the indifference which had protected her throughout the trip was stripped away and a single phrase began to dance through her head, over and over and over again: “He didn’t say good-bye to me. He didn’t even look at me.”
    The Citro=EBn moved swiftly westward leaving Paris behind: O was oblivious to the world outside the car. She was crying. Her face was still covered with tears when, half an hour later, the car turned off the main route and entered a forest road, over which tall beech trees cast dark shadows. It was raining, and the insides of the car windows, all of which were rolled up tightly, were steamed up. The driver tilted the back of the front seat until it was horizontal, then made O lie down upon it. The car had so little head room that O’s feet touched the