He had gone to bed.  Henriette and I remained under the acacias; the children were playing about us, bathed in the setting sun.  Our few exclamatory words revealed the mutuality of the thoughts in which we rested from our common sufferings.  When language failed silence as faithfully served our souls, which seemed to enter one another without hindrance; together they luxuriated in the charms of pensive languor, they met in the undulations of the same dream, they plunged as one into the river and came out refreshed like two nymphs as closely united as their souls could wish, but with no earthly tie to bind them.  We entered the unfathomable gulf, we returned to the surface with empty hands, asking each other by a look, “Among all our days on earth will there be one for us?”

In spite of the tranquil poetry of evening which gave to the bricks of the balustrade their orange tones, so soothing and so pure; in spite of the religious atmosphere of the hour, which softened the voices of the children and wafted them towards us, desire crept through my veins like the match to the bonfire.  After three months of repression I was unable to content myself with the fate assigned me.  I took Henriette’s hand and softly caressed it, trying to convey to her the ardor that invaded me.  She became at once Madame de Mortsauf, and withdrew her hand; tears rolled from my eyes, she saw them and gave me a chilling look, as she offered her hand to my lips.

“You must know,” she said, “that this will cause me grief.  A friendship that asks so great a favor is dangerous.”

Then I lost my self-control; I reproached her, I spoke of my sufferings, and the slight alleviation that I asked for them.  I dared to tell her that at my age, if the senses were all soul still the soul had a sex; that I could meet death, but not with closed lips.  She forced me to silence with her proud glance, in which I seemed to read the cry of the Mexican:  “And I, am I on a bed of roses?” Ever since that day by the gate of Frapesle, when I attributed to her the hope that our happiness might spring from a grave, I had turned with shame from the thought of staining her soul with the desires of a brutal passion.  She now spoke with honeyed lip, and told me that she never could be wholly mine, and that I ought to know it.  As she said the words I know that in obeying her I dug an abyss between us.  I bowed my head.  She went on, saying she had an inward religious certainty that she might love me as a brother without offending God or man; such love was a living image of the divine love, which her good Saint-Martin told her was the life of the world.  If I could not be to her somewhat as her old confessor was, less than a lover yet more than a brother, I must never see her again.  She could die and take to God her sheaf of sufferings, borne not without tears and anguish.

“I gave you,” she said in conclusion, “more than I ought to have given, so that nothing might be left to take, and I am punished.”