“You know that sadness and ennui were considered etiquette last winter, in a certain society, which was thrown into mourning by the July revolution.  Reunions were very few; there were no balls or soirees; dancing in drawing-rooms to the piano was hardly permissible, even with intimate friends.  When once I was installed in Mademoiselle de Corandeuil’s drawing-room upon a friendly footing, this cessation of worldly festivities gave me an opportunity to see Clemence in a rather intimate way.

“It would take too long to tell you now all the thousand and one little incidents which compose the history of all passions.  Profiting by her coquetry, which made her receive me kindly in order to make me expiate my success afterward, my love for her was soon an understood thing between us; she listened to me in a mocking way, but did not dispute my right to speak.  She ended by receiving my letters, after being constrained to do so through a course of strategies in which, truly, I showed incredible invention.  I was listened to and she read my letters; I asked for nothing more.

“My love, from the first, had been her secret as well as mine; but every day I made to sparkle some unexpected facet of this prism of a thousand colors.  Even after telling her a hundred times how much I adored her, my love still had for her the attraction of the unknown.  I really had something inexhaustible in my heart, and I was sure, in the end, to intoxicate her with this philtre, which I constantly poured out and which she drank, while making sport of it like a child.

“One day I found her thoughtful and silent.  She did not reply to me with her usual sprightliness during the few moments that I was able to talk with her; the expression of her eyes had changed; there was something deeper and less glowing in their depths; instead of dazzling me by their excessive splendor, as had often happened to me before, they seemed to soften as they rested on mine; she kept her eyelids a trifle lowered, as if she were tired of being gazed at by me.  Her voice, as she spoke, had a low, soft sound, a sort of inexplicable something which came from the very depths of her soul.  She never had looked at me with that glance or spoken to me in that tone before.  Upon that day I knew that she loved me.

“I returned to my home unutterably happy, for I loved this woman with a love of which I believed myself incapable.

“When I met Madame de Bergenheim again, I found her completely changed toward me; an icy gravity, an impassible calm, an ironical and disdainful haughtiness had taken the place of the delicious abandon of her former bearing.  In spite of my strong determination to allow myself to love with the utmost candor, it was impossible for me to return to that happy age when the frowning brows of the beautiful idol to whom we paid court inspired us with the resolve to drown ourselves.  I could not isolate myself from my past experiences.  My heart was rejuvenated, but my head remained old.  I was, therefore, not in the least discouraged by this change of humor, and the fit of anger which it portended.