“Adieu to the empty reveries brought about by spleen, and to the meditations ‘a la Werther’!  The sky was blue, the air pure, life delightful—­my talent was not dead.

“After this first effort, I slackened a little!  Madame de Bergenheim’s face, which I had seen but dimly during this short time, returned to me in a less vaporous form; I took extreme delight in calling to mind the slightest circumstances of our meeting, the smallest details of her features, her toilette, her manner of walking and carrying her head.  What had impressed me most was the extreme softness of her dark eyes, the almost childish tone of her voice, a vague odor of heliotrope with which her hair was perfumed; also the touch of her hand upon my arm.  I sometimes caught myself embracing myself in order to feel this last sensation again, and then I could not help laughing at my thoughts, which were worthy of a fifteen-year-old lover.

“I had felt so convinced of my powerlessness to love, that the thought of a serious passion did not at first enter my mind.  However, a remembrance of my beautiful traveller pervaded my thoughts more and more, and threatened to usurp the place of everything else.  I then subjected myself to a rigid analysis; I sought for the exact location of this sentiment whose involuntary yoke I already felt; I persuaded myself, for some time yet, that it was only the transient excitement of my brain, one of those fevers of imagination whose fleeting titillations I had felt more than once.

“But I realized that the evil, or the good—­for why call love an evil?—­had penetrated into the most remote regions of my being, and I realized the energy of my struggle like a person entombed who tries to extricate himself.  From the ashes of this volcano which I had believed to be extinct, a flower had suddenly blossomed, perfumed with the most fragrant of odors and decked with the most charming colors.  Artless enthusiasm, faith in love, all the brilliant array of the fresh illusions of my youth returned, as if by enchantment, to greet this new bloom of my life; it seemed to me as if I had been created a second time, since I was aided by intelligence and understood its mysteries while tasting of its delights.  My past, in the presence of this regeneration, was nothing more than a shadow at the bottom of an abyss.  I turned toward the future with the faith of a Mussulman who kneels with his face toward the East—­I loved!

“I returned to Paris, and applied to my friend Casorans, who knows the Faubourg Saint-Germain from Dan to Beersheba.

“‘Madame de Bergenheim,’ he said to me, ’is a very popular society woman, not very pretty, perhaps, rather clever, though, and very amiable.  She is one of our coquettes of the old nobility, and with her twenty-four carats’ virtue she always has two sufferers attached to her chariot, and a third on the waiting-list, and yet it is impossible for one to find a word to say against her behavior.