love’s noblest privilege is to prove itself by love.  Well, her words, her look, her pleasure, showed me her feelings, as I had formerly shown her mine by that first game of backgammon.  These ingenuous proofs of her affection were many; on the seventh day after my arrival she recovered her freshness, she sparkled with health and youth and happiness; my lily expanded in beauty just as the treasures of my heart increased.  Only in petty minds or in common hearts can absence lessen love or efface the features or diminish the beauty of our dear one.  To ardent imaginations, to all beings through whose veins enthusiasm passes like a crimson tide, and in whom passion takes the form of constancy, absence has the same effect as the sufferings of the early Christians, which strengthened their faith and made God visible to them.  In hearts that abound in love are there not incessant longings for a desired object, to which the glowing fire of our dreams gives higher value and a deeper tint?  Are we not conscious of instigations which give to the beloved features the beauty of the ideal by inspiring them with thought?  The past, dwelt on in all its details becomes magnified; the future teems with hope.  When two hearts filled with these electric clouds meet each other, their interview is like the welcome storm which revives the earth and stimulates it with the swift lightnings of the thunderbolt.  How many tender pleasures came to me when I found these thoughts and these sensations reciprocal!  With what glad eyes I followed the development of happiness in Henriette!  A woman who renews her life from that of her beloved gives, perhaps, a greater proof of feeling than she who dies killed by a doubt, withered on her stock for want of sap; I know not which of the two is the more touching.

The revival of Madame de Mortsauf was wholly natural, like the effects of the month of May upon the meadows, or those of the sun and of the brook upon the drooping flowers.  Henriette, like our dear valley of love, had had her winter; she revived like the valley in the springtime.  Before dinner we went down to the beloved terrace.  There, with one hand stroking the head of her son, who walked feebly beside her, silent, as though he were breeding an illness, she told me of her nights beside his pillow.

For three months, she said, she had lived wholly within herself, inhabiting, as it were, a dark palace; afraid to enter sumptuous rooms where the light shone, where festivals were given, to her denied, at the door of which she stood, one glance turned upon her child, another to a dim and distant figure; one ear listening for moans, another for a voice.  She told me poems, born of solitude, such as no poet ever sang; but all ingenuously, without one vestige of love, one trace of voluptuous thought, one echo of a poesy orientally soothing as the rose of Frangistan.  When the count joined us she continued in the same tone, like a woman secure within herself, able to look proudly at her husband and kiss the forehead of her son without a blush.  She had prayed much; she had clasped her hands for nights together over her child, refusing to let him die.