When I raised my head, the garret-window had noiselessly opened, and there, standing motionless in a flood of sunshine, her golden hair lifted gently by the morning breeze, was Louise gazing at me.

Madame, try to imagine what I felt; as for me, I shall never be able to give it expression.  I tried to speak, and my voice died away on my lips; I wished to stretch out my arms towards the celestial vision, they seemed to be made of stone and glued to my side; I wished to rush to her, my feet were nailed to the floor.  However, she still stood there smiling at me.  Finally, after a desperate effort, I succeeded in breaking the charm which bound me, and rushed from my room wild with delight, mad with happiness.  I was mad, that’s the word.  Holy madness! cold reason should humble itself in the dust before thee!  As quick as thought, by some magic, I found myself before Louise’s door.  I had recognised the house so long sought for before.  I entered without a question, guided alone by the perfume that ascended from the sanctuary; I took Louise’s hands in mine, and we stood gazing silently at each other in an ecstasy of happiness fatally lost and miraculously recovered; the ecstasy of two lovers, who, separated by a shipwreck, believing each other dead, meet, radiant with love and life, upon the same happy shore.

“Why, it was you!” she said at last, pointing to my room with a charming gesture.

“Why, it was you!” I exclaimed in my turn, eagerly glancing at a little brass lamp which I had observed on a table covered with screens, boxes of colors and porcelain palettes.

“You were the little light!”

“You were my evening star!”

And we both began to recite the poem of those two years of our lives, and we found that we told the same story.  Louise began my sentences and I finished hers.  In disclosing our heart secrets and the mysterious sympathy that had existed between us for two years, we interrupted each other with expressions of astonishment and admiration.  We paused time and time again to gaze at each other and press each other’s hands, as if to assure ourselves that we were awake and it was not all a dream.  And every moment this gay and charming refrain broke in upon our ecstasy: 

“So you were the brother and friend of my poverty!”

“So you were the sister and companion of my solitude!”

We finally approached in our recollections, through many windings, our meeting upon the banks of the Seine, under the shades of Richeport.

“What seems sad to me,” she said with touching grace, “is that after having loved me without knowing me, you should have left me as soon as you did know me.  You only worshipped your idle fancies, and, had I loved you then,” she continued, “I should have been forced to be jealous of this little lamp.”

I told her what inexorable necessity compelled me to leave Richeport and her.  Louise listened with a pensive and charming air; but when I came to speak of Edgar’s love, she burst out laughing and began to relate, in the gayest manner, some story or other about Turks, which I failed to understand.