“Women,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “can only love; men act; they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act.  But we can only think, and pray, and worship.”

A love that had sacrificed so much for her sake deserved a recompense.  She looked about her like a nightingale descending from a leafy covert to drink at a spring, to see if she were alone in the solitude, if the silence hid no witness; then she raised her head to Raoul, who bent his own, and let him take one kiss, the first and the only one that she ever gave in secret, feeling happier at that moment than she had felt in five years.  Raoul thought all his toils well-paid.  They both walked forward they scarcely knew where, but it was on the road to Auteuil; presently, however, they were forced to return and find their carriages, pacing together with the rhythmic step well-known to lovers.  Raoul had faith in that kiss given with the quiet facility of a sacred sentiment.  All the evil of it was in the mind of the world, not in that of the woman who walked beside him.  Marie herself, given over to the grateful admiration which characterizes the love of woman, walked with a firm, light step on the gravelled path, saying, like Raoul, but few words; yet those few were felt and full of meaning.  The sky was cloudless, the tall trees had burgeoned, a few green shoots were already brightening their myriad of brown twigs.  The shrubs, the birches, the willows, the poplars were showing their first diaphanous and tender foliage.  No soul resists these harmonies.  Love explained Nature as it had already explained society to Marie’s heart.

“I wish you have never loved any one but me,” she said.

“Your wish is realized,” replied Raoul.  “We have awakened in each other the only true love.”

He spoke the truth as he felt it.  Posing before this innocent young heart as a pure man, Raoul was caught himself by his own fine sentiments.  At first purely speculative and born of vanity, his love had now become sincere.  He began by lying, he had ended in speaking truth.  In all writers there is ever a sentiment, difficult to stifle, which impels them to admire the highest good.  The countess, on her part, after her first rush of gratitude and surprise, was charmed to have inspired such sacrifices, to have caused him to surmount such difficulties.  She was beloved by a man who was worthy of her!  Raoul was totally ignorant to what his imaginary grandeur bound him.  Women will not suffer their idol to step down from his pedestal.  They do not forgive the slightest pettiness in a god.  Marie was far from knowing the solution to the riddle given by Raoul to his friends at Very’s.  The struggle of this writer, risen from the lower classes, had cost him the ten first years of his youth; and now in the days of his success he longed to be loved by one of the queens of the great world.  Vanity, without which, as Champfort says, love would be but a feeble thing, sustained his passion and increased it day by day.