Unwilling to call any one, I lighted Brigitte’s lamp; I watched its feeble flame and my thoughts seemed to flicker in the darkness like its uncertain rays.

Whatever I had said or done, the idea of losing Brigitte had never occurred to me up to this time.  A hundred times I wished to leave her, but who has loved and is ready to say just what is in his heart?  That was in times of despair or of anger.  So long as I knew that she loved me, I was sure of loving her; stern necessity had just arisen between us for the first time.  I experienced a dull languor and could distinguish nothing clearly.  What my mind understood, my soul recoiled from accepting.  “Come,” I said to myself, “I have desired it and I have done it; there is not the slightest hope that we can live together; I am unwilling to kill this woman, so I have no alternative but to leave her.  It is all over; I shall go away tomorrow.”

And all the while I was thinking neither of my responsibility, nor of the past, nor future; I thought neither of Smith nor his connection with the affair; I could not say who had led me there, or what I had done during the last hour.  I looked at the walls of the room and thought that all I had to do was to wait until to-morrow and decide what carriage I would take.

I remained for a long time in this strange calm, just as the man who receives a thrust from a poignard feels at first only the cold steel and can often travel some distance ere he becomes weak, and his eyes start from their sockets and he realizes what has happened.  But drop by drop the blood flows, the ground under his feet becomes red, death comes; the man, at its approach, shudders with horror and falls as though struck by a thunderbolt.  Thus, apparently calm, I awaited the coming of misfortune; I repeated in a low voice what Brigitte had said, and I placed near her all that I supposed she would need for the night; then I looked at her, then went to the window and pressed my forehead against the pane peering out at a sombre and lowering sky; then I returned to the bedside.  That I was going away tomorrow was the only thought in my mind, and little by little the word “depart” became intelligible to me.  “Ah!  God!” I suddenly cried, “my poor mistress, I am about to lose you, and I have not known how to love you!”

I trembled at these words as if it had been another who had pronounced them; they resounded through all my being as resounds the string of the harp that has been plucked to the point of breaking.  In an instant two years of suffering again racked my breast, and after them as their consequence and as their last expression, the present seized me.  How shall I describe such woe?  By a single word, perhaps, for those who have loved.  I had taken Brigitte’s hand, and, in a dream, doubtless, she had pronounced my name.