Wait a few years, a few months, perhaps only a few weeks.  What has become of those handsome lovers so tenderly entwined?  They swore mouth to mouth an endless love.  Where are they?  Where are their loves?

As well would it be worth to ask where are the leaves of autumn which the evening breeze carried away last year.

  “But where are the snows of yester-year?”

What! already, it is finished!  And yet he had sworn to love her always.  Yes, but she also had sworn to be always amiable.  Which of the two first forfeited the oath?

There has been then a tragedy, a drama, despair, tears?  Nonsense!  Those who had sworn to die one for the other, one fine day parted as strangers.

The charming young girl whom you saw passing by, proud and radiant on the arm of that artless stripling, see, here she comes, a little weary, a little faded, but still charming, on the arm of that cynical Bohemian.

That poetical school-girl, who smiled and scattered daisies on the head of her lover, as he knelt before her, has become the adored wife of a dull tallow-chandler; and the other one, who took the ivy for her emblem, and who said to her sweetheart:  “I cling till death!” has clung to and separated from half-a-dozen others without dying, and has finished by fastening herself to a rheumatical old churchwarden, peevish but substantial.

And the lover?  He is no better:  he has loved twenty since; the deep sea of oblivion has passed between them, and among so many vanished mistresses, can he precisely remember her name?

Suzanne did not say all this to herself, she was ignorant of the whirlpools of life, but she felt instinctively that she was about to be precipated into an abyss.

She was not perverse, she was merely frivolous and coquettish, but she had received a vicious education.  Her imagination only had been corrupted, her heart had remained till then untainted.  It was a good ear of corn which somehow or another had made its way into the field of tares.

She reproached herself bitterly therefore for the shameful facility with which she had yielded herself to the priest, and she sought for an excuse to try and palliate her fault in her own eyes.

But she was unable to discover any genuine excuses.  A young girl is pardoned for yielding herself to her lover in a moment of forgetfulness and excitement, because she hopes that marriage will atone for her fault.

But what had she to claim?  What could she expect from this Cure?

Again a young wife is pardoned for deceiving an old husband, or a husband who is worthless, debauched and brutal, and for seeking a friend abroad whom she cannot find at her fire-side; but she?  Whom had she deceived?  Her father, who though severe, adored her.  Whom had she dishonoured?  The white hairs of that worthy, brave old man.