He saw, for instance, that what had attached him to Marthe was vanity, not love. Even that miracle of the lips she offered him was nothing more than the delighted astonishment of a power acknowledged and awakened by the conquest. The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of that initial astonishment by a certainty, the triumph of vanity over modesty. What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men’s eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his
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