"There on her narrow bed, she did not sleep as well as he thought; her sleep was a hundred times interrupted and full of dreams that were unpleasant and disjointed, absurd, meaningless, and distressingly erotic. Each time she wakes after such dreams, she feels uneasy. That, she thinks, is one of the secrets of a woman’s life, every woman’s: the nocturnal promiscuity that renders suspect all promises of fidelity, all purity, all innocence. In our century, nobody finds this offensive, but Chantal likes to imagine the Princesse de Clèves, or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s chaste Virginie, or Saint Theresa of Avila, or, in our own day, Mother Teresa running in a sweat through the world, doing her good works—she likes to imagine them emerging from their nights as from a cloaca of unacknowledgeable, improbable, imbecilic vices, and by day turning back into virginal, virtuous women."