Ah! how ugly it all is then!  Under the smoky lamp of reality you vaguely distinguish the battered grotesque shapes, rising in the ruins.

Suzanne therefore, like all her young friends, like you, Mademoiselle, and also like you formerly, Madame, had commenced her little romance, had sketched her little plot.  She had loved, oh truly loved, with a love necessarily confined to the platonic state, the handsome young men with tasty cravats, whom she had seen on days when she walked out.  What delightful chapters were sketched upon their brown or fair heads!  Oh! when would she be free?  When would she cease to have the ever-open eye of an inquisitive under-mistress upon her slightest gesture?

And then the day of liberty had come, and under the breath of that liberty, so eagerly and impatiently expected, the chapters she had begun were blotted out, and so was the handsome head of a cherub or an Amadis in a sublieutenant’s cap or in a chimney-pot.

Fallen from these enervating heights of fictitious passions and hair-dressers’ scents into the prosaic but generous and brave arms of paternal lore, on the breast of true and mighty nature, she had forgotten for a moment her dreams.

She lavished on her father all the treasures of affection which her heart contained, and treated him with all manner of solicitude and caresses; and the old soldier before this youthful future which shone before him, himself forgot his dreams of the past.

XXVIII.

THE SHADOW.

“Troubled by a vague emotion, I said to myself, I wanted to be loved, and I looked around me; I saw no one who inspired me with love, no one who appeared to me capable of feeling it.”

  BENJAMIN CONSTANT (Adolphe).

But what is the liberty that a well-behaved girl can enjoy?  She had run like a wild thing in the meadows, letting her hair fly in the wind, and elated by the kisses of the breeze.  She had relished the long mornings of idleness in bed, recollecting, in order to double her enjoyment, that at that very moment the friends she had left at school, were turning pale beneath the smoky lamps of the school-room; and in the evening she read the delightful novels of Droz by her lamp, and thought with pleasure that her same friends had been in bed for a long while.  Then she closed her book, and reflected again and said with a yawn:  “They are asleep, poor little things, and I am awake, I am free to be awake.”

And she wrote long letters to them in which she told them, how happy she was, assuming a charming air of superiority, treating them as children who knew nothing yet of life.  But she thought that she knew nothing more of it herself, and yearned to be instructed.

She felt that there was something wanting, and that her father’s affection was not enough to fill her heart.

She had looked well about her, but she had found only what was commonplace.  No more young clerks with curled hair, who darted inflammatory looks at the women from behind the shop-windows, no Saint-Cyrion with delicate moustache, no doctors of twenty-five or poets of eighteen.  Besides her father and the notabilities of the village, middle-aged dignitaries, nothing but peasants only.