“We must not forget Saint Anthony’s cell.”

“Therese, I am suffering in my happiness from everything that is yours and that escapes me.  I am suffering because you do not live for me alone.  I wish to have you wholly, and to have had you in the past.”

She shrugged her shoulders a little.

“Oh, the past!”

“The past is the only human reality.  Everything that is, is past.”

She raised toward him her eyes, which resembled bits of blue sky full of mingled sun and rain.

“Well, I may say this to you:  I never have felt that I lived except with you.”

When she returned to Fiesole, she found a brief and threatening letter from Le Menil.  He could not understand, her prolonged absence, her silence.  If she did not announce at once her return, he would go to Florence for her.

She read without astonishment, but was annoyed to see that everything disagreeable that could happen was happening, and that nothing would be spared to her of what she had feared.  She could still calm him and reassure him:  she had only to say to him that she loved him; that she would soon return to Paris; that he should renounce the foolish idea of rejoining her here; that Florence was a village where they would be watched at once.  But she would have to write:  “I love you.”  She must quiet him with caressing phrases.

She had not the courage to do it.  She would let him guess the truth.  She accused herself in veiled terms.  She wrote obscurely of souls carried away by the flood of life, and of the atom one is on the moving ocean of events.  She asked him, with affectionate sadness, to keep of her a fond reminiscence in a corner of his soul.

She took the letter to the post-office box on the Fiesole square.  Children were playing in the twilight.  She looked from the top of the hill to the beautiful cup which carried beautiful Florence like a jewel.  And the peace of night made her shiver.  She dropped the letter into the box.  Then only she had the clear vision of what she had done and of what the result would be.

CHAPTER XX

What is frankness?

In the square, where the spring sun scattered its yellow roses, the bells at noon dispersed the rustic crowd of grain-merchants assembled to sell their wares.  At the foot of the Lanzi, before the statues, the venders of ices had placed, on tables covered with red cotton, small castles bearing the inscription:  ‘Bibite ghiacciate’.  And joy descended from heaven to earth.  Therese and Jacques, returning from an early promenade in the Boboli Gardens, were passing before the illustrious loggia.  Therese looked at the Sabine by John of Bologna with that interested curiosity of a woman examining another woman.  But Dechartre looked at Therese only.  He said to her: 

“It is marvellous how the vivid light of day flatters your beauty, loves you, and caresses the mother-of-pearl on your cheeks.”