Rest in peace, dear Louise, for you will always be Louise to me, even in heaven, which I shall never reach, for I have killed my brother and belong to the race of Cain; I do not pity thee, for thou hast clasped in thy arms the dream of thy heart.  Thou hast been happy; and happiness is a crime punishable on earth by death, as is genius and divinity.

You will forgive me! for I caught a glimpse of the angel through the woman.  I also sought my ideal and found it.  O beautiful loving being! why did your faith fail you, why did you doubt the love you inspired!  Alas!  I thought you a faithless coquette; you were conscientious; your heart was a treasure that you could not reclaim, and you wished to bestow it worthily!  Now I know all; we always know all when it is too late, when the seal of the irreparable is fixed upon events!  You came to Havre, poor beauty, to find me, and fled believing yourself deceived; you could not read my despair through my fictitious joy; you took my mask for my real countenance, the intoxication of my body for the oblivion of my soul!  In the midst of my orgie, at the very moment when my foot pressed on the Ethiop’s body, your azure eyes illumined my dream, your blonde tresses rippled before me like golden waters of Paradise; thoughts of you filled my mind like a vase with divine essence! never have I loved you better; I loved you better than the condemned man, standing on the last step of the scaffold, loves life, than Satan loves heaven from the depths of hell!  My heart, if opened, would have exhibited your name written in all its fibres, like the grain of wood which runs through the whole tree.  Every particle of my being belonged to you; thoughts of you pervaded me, in every sense, as light passes through the air.  Your life was substituted for mine; I no longer possessed either free will or wish.

For a moment you paused upon the brink of the abyss, and started back affrighted; for no woman can gaze, unflinchingly, into the depths of man’s heart; precipices always have frightened you—­dear angel, as if you had not wings!  If you had paused an instant longer, you would have seen far, far in the gloom in a firmament of bright stars, your adored image.

Vain regrets! useless lamentation!  The damp and dark earth covers her delicate form!  Her beautiful eyes, her pure brow, her fascinating smile we shall never see again—­never—­never—­if we live thousands of years.  Every hour that passes but widens the distance between us.  Her beauty will fade in the tomb, her name be lost in oblivion!  For soon we shall have disappeared, pale forms bending over a marble tomb!

It is very sad, sinister and terrible, but yet it is best so.  See her in the arms of another:  Roger! what have we done to God to be damned alive!  I can pity Raymond, since death separates him from Louise.  May he forgive me!  He will, for he was a grand, a noble, a perfect friend.  We both failed to appreciate him, as a matter of course; folly and baseness are alone comprehended here below!