That look had effaced the memory of Arabella’s sarcasms.  Thus I was the plaything of the two irreconcilable passions I have now described to you; I was influenced by each alternately.  I loved an angel and a demon; two women equally beautiful,—­one adorned with all the virtues which we decry through hatred of our own imperfections, the other with all the vices which we deify through selfishness.  Returning along that avenue, looking back again and again at Madame de Mortsauf, as she leaned against a tree surrounded by her children who waved their handkerchiefs, I detected in my soul an emotion of pride in finding myself the arbiter of two such destinies; the glory, in ways so different, of women so distinguished; proud of inspiring such great passions that death must come to whichever I abandoned.  Ah! believe me, that passing conceit has been doubly punished!

I know not what demon prompted me to remain with Arabella and await the moment when the death of the count might give me Henriette; for she would ever love me.  Her harshness, her tears, her remorse, her Christian resignation, were so many eloquent signs of a sentiment that could no more be effaced from her heart than from mine.  Walking slowly down that pretty avenue and making these reflections, I was no longer twenty-five, I was fifty years old.  A man passes in a moment, even more quickly than a woman, from youth to middle age.  Though long ago I drove these evil thoughts away from me, I was then possessed by them, I must avow it.  Perhaps I owed their presence in my mind to the Tuileries, to the king’s cabinet.  Who could resist the polluting spirit of Louis XVIII.?

When I reached the end of the avenue I turned and rushed back in the twinkling of an eye, seeing that Henriette was still there, and alone!  I went to bid her a last farewell, bathed in repentant tears, the cause of which she never knew.  Tears sincere indeed; given, although I knew it not, to noble loves forever lost, to virgin emotions—­those flowers of our life which cannot bloom again.  Later, a man gives nothing, he receives; he loves himself in his mistress; but in youth he loves his mistress in himself.  Later, we inoculate with our tastes, perhaps our vices, the woman who loves us; but in the dawn of life she whom we love conveys to us her virtues, her conscience.  She invites us with a smile to the noble life; from her we learn the self-devotion which she practises.  Woe to the man who has not had his Henriette.  Woe to that other one who has never known a Lady Dudley.  The latter, if he marries, will not be able to keep his wife; the other will be abandoned by his mistress.  But joy to him who can find the two women in one woman; happy the man, dear Natalie, whom you love.