Personnages:
20 p. 127
Et comme elle était persuadée que ce dernier serait du sexe mâle, il arrivait à Lucile quand Marianne proférait une de ces sentences optimistes telles que : « Il n'a pas fini de faire parler de lui » ou : « Il ira loin », de se demander un instant s'il s'agissait du Réveil ou du futur Jérôme.
Durant deux heures, elle avait assisté, hébétée, à une comédie humaine accélérée où la flagornerie, la suffisance, la gravité, la médiocrité avaient mené bon train dans un souci général d'améliorer le tirage du rival de Jérôme.
And most of all, for the first time it hit her that Antoine was not like her, but was another—an other, a not her—and that all her intimacy with his hands, his mouth, his eyes, his body, did not mean he was her irrevocable soulmate.
And so for two full hours, a dumbfounded Lucile had witnessed a rapid-fire human comedy in which arrogance, bootlicking, pomposity, and mediocrity all vied with each other to do the best possible job [...]
One day, I was just looking at the word chamade and, as often happens when my mind is idling, I started juggling the letters around a little bit, and what popped out but "mad ache".