“What!” I answered, “you acknowledge your cruelty towards me?  You are afraid of the world guessing all your heartless rigour, and yet you continue to enjoy it!  You condemn me unmercifully to the torments of Tantalus!  You would be delighted to see me gay, cheerful, happy, even at the expense of a judgment by which the world would find you guilty of a supposed but false kindness towards me, and yet you refuse me even the slightest favours!”

“I do not mind people believing anything, provided it is not true.”

“What a contrast!  Would it be possible for me not to love you, for you to feel nothing for me?  Such contradictions strike me as unnatural.  But you are growing thinner yourself, and I am dying.  It must be so; we shall both die before long, you of consumption, I of exhausting decline; for I am now reduced to enjoying your shadow during the day, during the night, always, everywhere, except when I am in your presence.”

At that passionate declaration, delivered with all the ardour of an excited lover, she was surprised, deeply moved, and I thought that the happy hour had struck.  I folded her in my arms, and was already tasting the first fruits of enjoyment. . . .  The sentinel knocked twice!. . .  Oh! fatal mischance!  I recovered my composure and stood in front of her. . . .  M. D——­ R——­ made his appearance, and this time he found me in so cheerful a mood that he remained with us until one o’clock in the morning.

My comfits were beginning to be the talk of our society.  M. D---- R-----,
Madame F——­, and I were the only ones who had a box full of them.  I was
stingy with them, and no one durst beg any from me, because I had said
that they were very expensive, and that in all Corfu there was no
confectioner who could make or physician who could analyse them.  I never
gave one out of my crystal box, and Madame F. remarked it.  I certainly
did not believe them to be amorous philtre, and I was very far from
supposing that the addition of the hair made them taste more delicious;
but a superstition, the offspring of my love, caused me to cherish them,
and it made me happy to think that a small portion of the woman I
worshipped was thus becoming a part of my being.

Influenced perhaps by some secret sympathy, Madame F. was exceedingly fond of the comfits.  She asserted before all her friends that they were the universal panacea, and knowing herself perfect mistress of the inventor, she did not enquire after the secret of the composition.  But having observed that I gave away only the comfits which I kept in my tortoise-shell box, and that I never eat any but those from the crystal box, she one day asked me what reason I had for that.  Without taking time to think, I told her that in those I kept for myself there was a certain ingredient which made the partaker love her.

“I do not believe it,” she answered; “but are they different from those I eat myself?”

“They are exactly the same, with the exception of the ingredient I have just mentioned, which has been put only in mine.”