...of a building

And now he is silently coming back upstairs to catch the disobedient girl red-handed: creeping up to a windowpane exposed to all eyes, and this moreover at precisely the moment when the justification for the prohibition is particularly obvious.

After having laid his key as usual on the marble table top, near the brass candlestick, he slowly mounts the steps, one by one, leaning on the wooden banister, for the excessive steepness of the stairs makes him feel once more the accumulated fatigue of the last several days: several days of watchfulness, expectation, of prolonged meetings, of errands by subway or on foot from one end of the city to the other, as far as the most outlying districts, far beyond the river... For how many days?

Having reached the first landing, he stops in order to listen, ears cocked for the faint creaks throughout the building. But there is neither a creak, nor the sound of material tearing, nor breath caught; there is nothing but silence and closed doors along the empty corridor.

[Project for a Revolution in New York, Robbe-Grillet, A.]