Chapter IExactly why Émilie Vignon remained a virgin until the evening she met Irimia C. Irimia, I couldn’t tell you. Idleness or a lack of imagination. Everything seemed to conspire against this long period of chastity: the example of her friends, the loose morals of the neighbourhood, her bitter life without any pleasures. When I met her, she was a girl of twenty, stocky, stiff, with an empty gaze and a dull complexion. I wondered sometimes how she must have looked before, in her childhood, but despite every effort of the imagination, I couldn’t picture it. She was, in all honesty, a gentle creature, and her plainness gave her a somewhat resigned air, which I liked. Even today, after all this time, I can’t help thinking of her without feeling some kind of melancholic camaraderie and the
