“I found something yesterday more beautiful than your beauty, something sweeter than your voice, a light more glorious than the light of your eyes, a fragrance for which there is no name—yesterday your soul was visible and tangible. Oh! it was torment to me that I could not open my heart and take you into it to revive you. In short, I yesterday got over the respectful fear I have felt for you, for did not your weakness draw us nearer to each other? I learned the joy of breathing as I breathed with you, when the spasm left you free to inhale our air. What prayers flew up to heaven in one moment! Since I did not die of rushing through the space I crossed to beseech God to leave you to me yet a while, it is not possible to die of joy or of grief.
“That moment has left, buried in my soul, memories which can never rise to the surface without bringing tears to my eyes; every joy will make the furrow longer, every grief will make it deeper. Yes; the fears that racked my soul yesterday will remain a standard of comparison for all my sorrows to come, as the happiness you have given me, dear perpetual first thought of my life, will prevail over every joy that the hand of God may ever vouchsafe me. You have made me understand Divine love, that trustful love which, secure in its strength and permanency, knows neither suspicion nor jealousy.”
The deepest melancholy gnawed at my heart; the sight of this home was so heartbreaking to a youth so fresh and new to social emotions—the sight, at the threshold of the world, of a bottomless gulf, a dead sea. This hideous concentration of woes suggested infinite reflections, and at my very first steps in social life I had found a standard so immense that any other scenes could but look small when measured by it. My melancholy left Monsieur and Madame de Chessel to suppose that my love affair was luckless, so that I was happy in not injuring my noble Henriette by my passion.
On the following day, on going into the drawing-room, I found her alone. She looked at me for a moment, holding out her hand; she said, “Will the friend always persist in being too tender?” The tears rose to her eyes; she got up, and added in a tone of desperate entreaty, “Never write to me again in such a strain.”
Monsieur de Mortsauf was most friendly. The Countess had recovered her courage and her serene brow; but her pallor showed traces of yesterday’s trouble which, though subdued, was not extinct.
In the evening, as we took a walk, the autumn leaves rustling under our feet, she said:
“Pain is infinite, joy has its limits,” a speech which revealed the extent of her sufferings by comparison with her transient happiness.
“Do not calumniate life,” said I. “You know nothing of love; there are delights which flame up to the heavens.”
“Hush,” said she, “I do not want to know them. A Greenlander would die in Italy! I am calm and happy in your society, I can tell you all my thoughts; do not destroy my confidence. Why should you not have the virtue of a priest and the charms of a free man?”
“You could make me swallow a cup of hemlock,” said I, laying her hand on my heart, which was beating rapidly.
“Again!” said she, withdrawing her hand as if she felt some sudden pain. “Do you want to deprive me of the melancholy joy of feeling my bleeding wounds staunched by a friend’s hand? Do not add to my miseries; you do not yet know them all, and the most secret are the hardest of all to swallow. If you were a woman, you would understand the distress and bitterness into which her proud spirit is plunged when she is the object of attentions which make up for nothing, and are supposed to make up for everything. For a few days now I shall be courted and petted; he will want to be forgiven for having put himself in the wrong. I could now gain assent to the most unreasonable desires. And I am humiliated by this servility, by caresses which will cease as soon as he thinks I have forgotten everything. Is it not a terrible condition of life to owe the kindness of one’s tyrant only to his errors—”
“To his crimes,” I eagerly put in.
“Besides,” she went on, with a sad smile, “I do not know how to make use of this temporary advantage. At this moment I am in the position of a knight who would never strike a fallen foe. To see the man I ought to honor on the ground, to raise him only to receive fresh blows, to suffer more from his fall than he himself does, and consider myself dishonored by taking advantage of a transient success, even for a useful end, to waste my strength, and exhaust all the resources of my spirit in these ignominious struggles, to rule only at the moment when I am mortally wounded? Death is better!
“If I had no children, I should let myself be carried down the stream; but if it were not for my covert courage, what would become of them? I must live for them, however terrible life may be.—You talk to me of love! Why, my friend, only think of the hell I should fall into if I gave that man—ruthless, as all
