allusions to it, heaving little admirably modulated sighs.
“A woman so good, so beautiful, so impassioned, who has made such great sacrifices, who is absolutely free from reproach, a chosen vessel, a pearl of love, a spotless mirror, a drop of milk, a white rose, an ideal essence for the perfume of a life-a woman who should have been worshipped on bended knees, and who, after her death, ought to be cut in small pieces for the purpose of relics-to abandon her iniquitously, fraudulently, villainously! Why, a corsair would not do worse! To give her her death-blow-for she will assuredly die of it! A man must have a paving- stone in his body instead of a heart to behave in such a way.
“O men! men!
“I say this to myself, but perhaps it is not true.
“Excellent hypocrites as women naturally are, I can scarcely believe that they could go so far as this; are not Rosette's demonstrations after all only the accurate expression of her feelings towards me? However this may be, the continuation of the tete-a-tete is no longer possible, and the fair chatelaine has at last just sent off invitations to her acquaintances in the neighborhood. We are busy making preparations to receive these worthy country people. Good-bye, dear friend.”
V
“I was wrong. My wicked heart, being incapable of love, had given itself this reason that it might deliver itself from a weight of gratitude which it could not support. I had joyfully seized this idea in order to excuse myself in my own eyes. I had clung to it, but nothing in the world could have been more untrue. Rosette was not playing a part, and if ever a woman was true, it is she. Well! I almost bear her ill-will for the sincerity of her passion, which is one tie the more, and makes a rupture more difficult or less excusable; I would rather have her false and fickle. What a singular position is this! You wish to go away and you remain; you wish to say, 'I hate you,' and you say, 'I love you;' your past impels you onward and prevents you from returning or stopping. You are faithful, and you regret it. An indefinable kind of shame prevents you from giving yourself up entirely to other acquaintances, and makes you compound with yourself. You give to one all that you can take from the other without sacrificing appearances; times and opportunities for seeing each other, which once presented themselves so naturally, are now to be discovered only with difficulty. You begin to remember that you have business of importance.
“Such a situation full of twitchings is most painful, but it is not so much so as mine. When it is a new friendship that takes you away from the old it is easier to get free. Hope smiles sweetly on you from the threshold of the house that contains your young loves. A fairer and more rosier illusion hovers white-winged over the newly- closed tomb of its sister lately dead; another blossom more mature and more balmy, on which there trembles a heavenly tear, has sprung up suddenly from among the withered flower-cups of the old bouquet; fair azure-tinted vistas open up before you; avenues of yoke-elms, discreet and humid, extend to the horizon; there are gardens with a few pale statues, or some bank supported by an ivy-clad wall, lawns starred with daisies, narrow balconies where leaning on your elbow you gaze at the moon, shadows intersected with furtive glimmerings, drawing-rooms with light subdued by ample curtains; all the obscurity and isolation sought by the love which dares not show itself.
“It is like a new youth that comes to you. You have, besides, change of place, habit, and people; you feel, perhaps, a species of remorse, but the desire that hovers and buzzes about your head like a bee in the springtime prevents you from hearkening to its voice; the void in your heart is filled and your memories fade beneath new impressions. But in this case it is different. I love nobody, and it is only from lassitude and weariness of myself rather than of her that I wish that I could break with Rosette.
“My old notions, which had slumbered for a little while, awake more foolish than ever. I am tormented as before with the desire of having a mistress, and as before, in Rosette's very arms, I doubt whether I have ever had one. I see again the fair lady at her window in her park of the time of Louis XIII., and the huntress on her white horse gallops across the avenue in the forest. My ideal beauty smiles at me from the height of her hammock of clouds, I seem to recognize her voice in the song of the birds, or the murmuring of the foliage; I think that I am being called in all directions, and that the daughters of the air touch my face with the fringe of their invisible scarfs. As in the times of my perturbations, I imagine that if I were to post off on the spot and go somewhere, far away and quickly, I should reach a spot where things that concern me are taking place and where my destinies are being decided.
“I feel that I am being waited for impatiently in some corner of the earth, I know not which. A suffering soul that cannot come to me calls eagerly for me and dreams of me; it is this that causes my disquietude, and renders me incapable of remaining where I am; I am drawn violently out of my element. My nature is not one of those that is the centre of others, one of these fixed stars around which other lights gravitate; I must wander over the plains of the sky like an unruly meteor, until I have met with the planet whose satellite I am to be, the Saturn on whom I am to place my ring. Oh! when will this marriage be accomplished? Until then I cannot hope to be in my proper position and at rest, and I shall be like the distracted and vacillating compass-needle when seeking for its pole.
“I have suffered my wings to be caught in this treacherous bird-lime, hoping that I should leave only a feather behind, and believing myself able to fly away when I should think fit to do so. Nothing could be more difficult; I find that I am covered with an imperceptible net more difficult to break than that forged by Vulcan, and the texture of the meshes is so fine and close that there is no aperture admitting of escape. The net, moreover, is large, and it is possible to move about inside it with an appearance of freedom; it can scarcely be perceived, save when an attempt is made to break it, but then it resists and becomes as solid as a wall of brass.
“How much time have I lost, O my ideal! without making the slightest effort to realize thee! How have I slothfully abandoned myself to the voluptuousness of a night! and how little do I deserve to find thee!
“Sometimes I think of forming another connection; but I have no one in view. More frequently I propose, if I succeed in breaking these bonds, never to enter into similar ones again; and yet there is nothing to justify such a resolution, for this affair has been apparently a very happy one, and I have not the least complaint to make against Rosette. She has always been good to me; her conduct could not have been better. Her fidelity to me has been exemplary; she has not occasioned the slightest suspicion. The most vigilant and restless jealousy would have found nothing to say against her, and would have been obliged to fall asleep. A man could have been jealous only for things that were past; although it is true that in that case he would have had abundant reason to be so. But jealousy of this description is a nicety which happily is rather rare; the present is quite enough without going back to search beneath the rubbish of old passions for phials of poison and cups of gall.
“What woman could you love if you thought of all this? You know, in a confused way, that a woman has had several lovers before you; but you say to yourself-so full of tortuous turnings and windings is the pride of man! — that you are the first that she has truly loved, and that it was owing to a concurrence of fatal circumstances that she found herself united to people unworthy of her, or perhaps that it was the vague longing of a heart which was seeking for its own satisfaction, and which changed because it had not found.
“Perhaps it is impossible to really love any one but a virgin-a virgin in body and mind-a frail bud which no zephyr has as yet caressed, and the closed bosom of which has received neither raindrop nor pearly dew, a chaste flower which unfolds its white robe for you alone, a fair lily with silver urn wherein no desire has been quenched, and which has been gilded only by your sun, rocked only by your breath, watered only by your hand. The radiance of noon is not worth the divine paleness of dawn, and all the fervor of a soul that has experience and knowledge of life yields to the heavenly ignorance of a young heart that is waking up to love. Ah! what a bitter and shameful thought is it that you are wiping away the kisses of another, that there is not, perhaps, a single spot on this brow, these lips, this throat, these shoulders, on this whole body which is yours now, that has not been reddened and marked by strange lips; that these divine murmurs coming to the assistance of the tongue, whose words have failed, have been heard before; that these senses, which are so greatly moved, have not learned their ecstasy and their delirium from you, and that deep down, far away in the retirement of one of these recesses of the soul that are never visited, there watches an inexorable recollection which compares the pleasures of former times with the pleasures of to-day!
“Although my natural supineness leads me to prefer high roads to unbeaten paths, and a public drinking- fountain to a mountain-spring, I must absolutely try to love some virginal creature as pure as snow, as trembling as the sensitive plant, who can only blush, and cast down her eyes. Perhaps beneath this limpid flood, into which no
