“Once, for an instant, you had a vision of happiness.  Paolo, tumbling from the lofty sphere where his spirit was constantly soaring, was amazed to find reality so sweet; you fancied that his madness would be lulled in the arms of love.  But before long Music again clutched her prey.  The dazzling mirage which had cheated you into the joys of reciprocal love made the lonely path on which you had started look more desolate and barren.

“In the tale your husband has just told me, I could read, as plainly as in the contrast between your looks and his, all the painful secrets of that ill-assorted union, in which you have accepted the sufferer’s part.  Though your conduct has been unfailingly heroical, though your firmness has never once given way in the exercise of your painful duties, perhaps, in the silence of lonely nights, the heart that at this moment is beating so wildly in your breast, may, from time to time, have rebelled.  Your husband’s superiority was in itself your worst torment.  If he had been less noble, less single-minded, you might have deserted him; but his virtues upheld yours; you wondered, perhaps, whether his heroism or your own would be the first to give way.

“You clung to your really magnanimous task as Paolo clung to his chimera.  If you had had nothing but a devotion to duty to guide and sustain you, triumph might have seemed easier; you would only have had to crush your heart, and transfer your life into the world of abstractions; religion would have absorbed all else, and you would have lived for an idea, like those saintly women who kill all the instincts of nature at the foot of the altar.  But the all-pervading charm of Paolo, the loftiness of his mind, his rare and touching proofs of tenderness, constantly drag you down from that ideal realm where virtue would fain maintain you; they perennially revive in you the energies you have exhausted in contending with the phantom of love.  You never suspected this!  The faintest glimmer of hope led you on in pursuit of the sweet vision.

“At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your patience,—­an angel would have lost it long since,—­and now the apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.  Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this world.  When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your past youth, sacrificed, if not wasted; you then bitterly discerned the blunder of nature that had given you a father when you looked for a husband.  You asked yourself whether you had not gone beyond the duty of a wife in keeping yourself wholly for a man who was bound up in his science.  Marianna, leave your hand in mine; all I have said is true.  And you looked about you—­but now you were in Paris, not in Italy, where men know how to love——­”