Was I not terribly mistaken?  If Brigitte was imprudent, was it not my place to be cautious and ward off danger?  On the contrary, I took, so to speak, the part of the world against her.

I began by indifference; I was soon to grow malignant.

“It is true,” I said, “that they speak evil of your nocturnal excursions.  Are you sure that they are wrong?  Has nothing happened in those romantic grottoes and by-paths in the forest?  Have you never accepted the arm of an unknown as you accepted mine?  Was it merely charity that served as your divinity in that beautiful temple of verdure that you visited so bravely?”

Brigitte’s glance when I adopted this tone I shall never forget; I shuddered at it myself.  “But, bah!” I thought, “she would do the same thing that my other mistress did—­she would point me out as a ridiculous fool, and I should pay for it all in the eyes of the public.”

Between the man who doubts and the man who denies there is only a step.  All philosophy is akin to atheism.  Having told Brigitte that I suspected her past conduct, I began to regard it with real suspicion.

I came to imagine that Brigitte was deceiving me, she who never left me at any hour of the day; I sometimes planned long absences in order to test her, as I supposed; but in truth it was only to give myself some excuse for suspicion and mockery.  And then I took pleasure in observing that I had outgrown my foolish jealousy, which was the same as saying that I no longer esteemed her highly enough to be jealous of her.

At first I kept such thoughts to myself, but soon found pleasure in revealing them to Brigitte.  We had gone out for a walk: 

“That dress is pretty,” I said, “such and such a girl, belonging to one of my friends, has one like it.”

We were now seated at table.

“Come, my dear, my former mistress used to sing for me at dessert; you promised, you know, to imitate her.”

She sat down at the piano.

“Ah! pardon me, but will you play that waltz that was so popular last winter?  That will remind me of happy times.”

Reader, this lasted six months:  for six long months Brigitte, scandalized, exposed to the insults of the world, had to endure from me all the wrongs that a wrathful and cruel libertine can inflict on woman.

After these distressing scenes, in which my own spirit exhausted itself in suffering and in painful contemplation of the past; after recovering from that frenzy, a strange access of love, an extreme exaltation, led me to treat my mistress like an idol, or a divinity.  A quarter of an hour after insulting her I was on my knees before her; when I was not accusing her of some crime, I was begging her pardon; when I was not mocking, I was weeping.  Then, seized by a delirium of joy, I almost lost my reason in the violence of my transports; I did not know what to do, what to say, what to think, in order to repair the evil I had done.