“To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to preserve her power,” said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had left her.  And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.

The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made it no easier to play.  When he wanted to go out after dinner he would perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would say, “Did I wound you?”

These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love.  The mother, alas, gave way to the mistress with shameful readiness.  She felt herself a mere plaything in the man’s hands, and at last she confessed to herself: 

“Well, then, I will be his plaything!” finding joy in it—­the rapture of damnation.

When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in solitude, she felt her courage fail.  She preferred the anticipated and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a No persuaded to be Yes.  At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince’s table.

When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight: 

“Will he come home, or will he not?” she was not alive again till she heard the familiar sound of Lousteau’s boots, and his well-known ring at the bell.

She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that agitated heart.  How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne, saying to herself, “To-morrow we part.”  And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!

It was terrible.  More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed.  In fact, she had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a loving woman bears in her heart.

The romance of Adolphe was her Bible, her study, for above all else she would not be an Ellenore.  She allowed herself no tears, she avoided all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom we owe an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed to Dinah almost superior to the book.  And she read again and again this fine essay by the only real critic who has written in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an article now printed at the beginning of the new edition of Adolphe.