a blow, who comes upon you unawares in your sleep and makes it last eternally, who strikes without warning and spares you a struggle?  Why a happy life, an honored life, to the murderer who drop by drop pours gall into the soul and saps the body to destroy it?  How many murderers go unpunished!  What indulgence for fashionable vice!  What condoning of the homicides caused by moral wrongs!  I know not whose avenging hand it was that suddenly, at that moment, raised the painted curtain that reveals society.  I saw before me many victims known to you and me, —­Madame de Beauseant, dying, and starting for Normandy only a few days earlier; the Duchesse de Langeais lost; Lady Brandon hiding herself in Touraine in the little house where Lady Dudley had stayed two weeks, and dying there, killed by a frightful catastrophe,—­you know it.  Our period teems with such events.  Who does not remember that poor young woman who poisoned herself, overcome by jealousy, which was perhaps killing Madame de Mortsauf?  Who has not shuddered at the fate of that enchanting young girl who perished after two years of marriage, like a flower torn by the wind, the victim of her chaste ignorance, the victim of a villain with whom Ronquerolles, Montriveau, and de Marsay shake hands because he is useful to their political projects?  What heart has failed to throb at the recital of the last hours of the woman whom no entreaties could soften, and who would never see her husband after nobly paying his debts?  Madame d’Aiglemont saw death beside her and was saved only by my brother’s care.  Society and science are accomplices in crimes for which there are no assizes.  The world declares that no one dies of grief, or of despair; nor yet of love, of anguish hidden, of hopes cultivated yet fruitless, again and again replanted yet forever uprooted.  Our new scientific nomenclature has plenty of words to explain these things; gastritis, pericarditis, all the thousand maladies of women the names of which are whispered in the ear, all serve as passports to the coffin followed by hypocritical tears that are soon wiped by the hand of a notary.  Can there be at the bottom of this great evil some law which we do not know?  Must the centenary pitilessly strew the earth with corpses and dry them to dust about him that he may raise himself, as the millionaire battens on a myriad of little industries?  Is there some powerful and venomous life which feasts on these gentle, tender creatures?  My God! do I belong to the race of tigers?

Remorse gripped my heart in its scorching fingers, and my cheeks were furrowed with tears as I entered the avenue of Clochegourde on a damp October morning, which loosened the dead leaves of the poplars planted by Henriette in the path where once she stood and waved her handkerchief as if to recall me.  Was she living?  Why did I feel her two white hands upon my head laid prostrate in the dust?  In that moment I paid for all the pleasures that Arabella had given me, and I knew that I paid dearly.  I swore not to see her again, and a hatred of England took possession of me.  Though Lady Dudley was only a variety of her species, I included all Englishwomen in my judgment.