Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon

around sharply, as though at that very moment she had felt behind her the presence of the man she was thinking about, but it was only a young couple, so spruce and smiling that one could tell, at a glance, that they were on their honeymoon.
    â€œI wonder where he can have gone. I know him, he’s quite capable of having given himself up to the police.… Otherwise, if he’s still prowling around Marseilles, he’s quite capable of playing some dirty trick on me.
    â€œI went dancing.… A real gentleman, who was in the orange trade, offered to see me home.… Just as I was leaving the dance hall with him I saw Jean standing on the edge of the sidewalk.…
    â€œHe didn’t say a word to me. He started walking. I dropped the other fellow, whom I’d hardly recognize if I saw him again, and I rushed after him, calling ‘Jean! Listen to me!’
    â€œHe went back to the hotel; his teeth were clenched and he was as white as this napkin. He began to pack his suitcase. He called me all sorts of names.…
    â€œAnd yet I give you my word I loved him.… I even believe that if I were to see him again now …”
    The crowds were thinning out around the tables. Cigarette smoke began to fill the room, with the smell of spirits and liqueurs.
    â€œCoffee, messieurs-dames? ”
    There was another scene that had often struck Monsieur Monde, a scene one can glimpse in the streets of Paris when one peers into a restaurant through the window: facing one another across a table from which the meal has been cleared, with a soiled tablecloth, coffee cups, glasses of brandy or liqueur, a middle-aged stoutish man with a florid complexion and a happy though somewhat anxious look in his eyes, and a young woman holding her handbag up to her face and repainting the bow of her lips with the help of the mirror.
    He had dreamed of that. He had envied them. Julie touched up her face, hunted in her handbag, called the waiter. “Have you got cigarettes?”
    And presently her lips stained the pallid tip of a cigarette with a vivid pink that was more sensuously feminine than a woman’s blood.
    She had said everything. She had finished. Drained now, she stared at herself in the mirror over her companion’s shoulder, and little furrows in her forehead betrayed the return of her anxiety.
    It was not a question of love, now, but of survival. What exactly was she thinking? Two or three times she scrutinized the man with swift little glances, sizing him up, gauging his possible usefulness.
    And he, ill at ease and aware of the stupidity of his question, stammered out: “What are you going to do?”
    A curt shrug of the shoulders.
    He had felt so envious of those who take no heed for the morrow and know none of the responsibilities with which other men burden themselves!
    â€œHave you any money?”
    Her eyes half closed because of the smoke she was exhaling; she picked up her bag and held it out to him.
    He had already opened it the night before. He found it just as it was, with the cosmetics, a scrap of pencil, and a few crumpled notes, including a thousand-franc one.
    She looked him sternly in the eyes, and then her lips formed a contemptuous, terribly contemptuous smile, as she said: “That’s not what’s worrying me, for sure!”
    It was late. They were almost alone, now, in the deserted dining room, where the waiters were beginning to tidy up, and in one corner waitresses were already laying out cutlery for the evening meal.
    â€œWaiter!”
    â€œComing, monsieur …”
    And the fluttering figures were snapped up by the purple pencil and lined up on a pad of paper, one sheet of which was pulled off and laid on the cloth in front of Monsieur Monde.
    He had a great deal of money in his wallet. He had slipped in as many notes as it would hold, and it embarrassed him to open it; he did so with reluctance, in the furtive manner of a miser; he realized that