I had known Madame Pierson four months, but I knew nothing of her past life and had never questioned her about it.  I had yielded to my love for her with confidence and without reservation.  I found a sort of pleasure in taking her just as she was, for just what she seemed, while suspicion and jealousy are so foreign to my nature that I was more surprised at feeling them toward Brigitte than she was in discovering them in me.  Never in my first love nor in the affairs of daily life have I been distrustful, but on the contrary bold and frank, suspecting nothing.  I had to see my mistress betray me before my eyes before I would believe that she could deceive me.  Desgenais himself, while preaching to me after his manner, joked me about the ease with which I could be duped.  The story of my life was an incontestable proof that I was credulous rather than suspicious; and when the words in that book suddenly struck me, it seemed to me I felt a new being within me, a sort of unknown self; my reason revolted against the feeling, and I did not dare ask whither all this was leading me.

But the suffering I had endured, the memory of the perfidy that I had witnessed, the frightful cure I had imposed on myself, the opinions of my friends, the corrupt life I had led, the sad truths I had learned, as well as those that I had unconsciously surmised during my sad experience, ending in debauchery, contempt of love, abuse of everything, that is what I had in my heart although I did not suspect it; and at the moment when life and hope were again being born within me, all these furies that were being atrophied by time seized me by the throat and cried that they were yet alive.

I bent over and opened the book, then immediately closed it and threw it on the table.  Brigitte was looking at me; in her beautiful eyes was neither wounded pride nor anger; nothing but tender solicitude, as if I were ill.

“Do you think I have secrets?” she asked, embracing me.

“No,” I replied, “I know nothing except that you are beautiful and that I would die loving you.”

When I returned home to dinner I said to Larive: 

“Who is Madame Pierson?”

He looked at me in astonishment.

“You have lived here many years,” I continued; “you ought to know better than I. What do they say of her here?  What do they think of her in the village?  What kind of life did she lead before I knew her?  Whom did she receive as her friends?”

“In faith, sir, I have never seen her do otherwise than she does every day, that is to say, walk in the valley, play picquet with her aunt, and visit the poor.  The peasants call her Brigitte la Rose; I have never heard a word against her except that she goes through the woods alone at all hours of the day and night; but that is when engaged in charitable work.  She is the ministering angel in the valley.  As for those she receives, there are only the cure and Monsieur de Dalens during vacation.”