in her than that.  She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things, that I should like to put into books.  But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of feeling—­nervous feeling.  I don’t know ... perhaps....  She has lived her life ... yes, within certain limits she has lived her life.  None of us do more than that.  True.  I remember the first time I saw her.  Sharp, little, and merry—­a changeable little sprite.  I thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month.  It is now seven years ago.  How time passes!  I was very young then.  What battles we have had, what quarrels!  Still we had good times together.  She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that.  I never got the better of her but once ... once I did, enfin!  She soon made up for lost ground.  I wonder what the charm was.  I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I know....  I never knew if she cared for me, never.  There were moments when....  Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness.  I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband,—­one never knew her,—­I never knew how she would receive me.  The last time I saw her ... that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door.  However, she could not blame me that time—­and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement.  She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to think of it night and day.  I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord.  And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were!  That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt;—­the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere, the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, l’homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c’est-a-dire, dans le monde, the success of Georges Ohnet and the talent of Gustave Dore.  But with all this vulgarity of taste certain appreciations, certain ebullitions of sentiment, within the radius of sentiment certain elevations and depravities,—­depravities in the legitimate sense of the word, that is to say, a revolt against the commonplace....

Ha, ha, ha! how I have been dreaming.  I wish I had not been awoke from my reverie, it was pleasant.