From my seat I could see on the highroad the handsome carriages that were whirling from Nice to Monaco; inside them I saw young, pretty, rich and happy women and smiling, satisfied men.  Following my eye, she understood my thought and murmured with a smile of resignation: 

“One cannot both be and have been.”

“How beautiful life must have been for you!” I said.

She heaved a great sigh.

“Beautiful and sweet!  And for that reason I regret it so much.”

I saw that she was disposed to talk of herself, so I began to question her, gently and discreetly, as one might touch bruised flesh.

She spoke of her successes, her intoxications and her friends, of her whole triumphant existence.

“Was it on the stage that you found your most intense joys, your true happiness?” I asked.

“Oh, no!” she replied quickly.

I smiled; then, raising her eyes to the two portraits, she said, with a sad glance: 

“It was with them.”

“Which one?” I could not help asking.

“Both.  I even confuse them up a little now in my old woman’s memory, and then I feel remorse.”

“Then, madame, your acknowledgment is not to them, but to Love itself.  They were merely its interpreters.”

“That is possible.  But what interpreters!”

“Are you sure that you have not been, or that you might not have been, loved as well or better by a simple man, but not a great man, who would have offered to you his whole life and heart, all his thoughts, all his days, his whole being, while these gave you two redoubtable rivals, Music and Poetry?”

“No, monsieur, no!” she exclaimed emphatically, with that still youthful voice, which caused the soul to vibrate.  “Another one might perhaps have loved me more, but he would not have loved me as these did.  Ah! those two sang to me of the music of love as no one else in the world could have sung of it.  How they intoxicated me!  Could any other man express what they knew so well how to express in tones and in words?  Is it enough merely to love if one cannot put all the poetry and all the music of heaven and earth into love?  And they knew how to make a woman delirious with songs and with words.  Yes, perhaps there was more of illusion than of reality in our passion; but these illusions lift you into the clouds, while realities always leave you trailing in the dust.  If others have loved me more, through these two I have understood, felt and worshipped love.”

Suddenly she began to weep.

She wept silently, shedding tears of despair.

I pretended not to see, looking off into the distance.  She resumed, after a few minutes: 

“You see, monsieur, with nearly every one the heart ages with the body.  But this has not happened with me.  My body is sixty-nine years old, while my poor heart is only twenty.  And that is the reason why I live all alone, with my flowers and my dreams.”