Perhaps this was not, as the writer had first presumed, a heroic tale of love worthy of Homer and the Ancients, but instead some cheap, modern story out of Paul de Kock; and perhaps the commandant was even now boasting to a messful of fellow officers about his melodramatic gesture and its sexual reward. Such contamination of romance was all too likely in the modern world, Maupassant concluded; even if the initial gesture, and the night of love, remained, and had their own purity.
