This state of feeling began to act like an obsession, a sort of witchcraft, which alarmed him.  What was she really, this strange creature?  A peasant indeed, apparently; but there was also something more refined and cultivated about her, due, doubtless, to her having received her education in a city school.  She both felt and expressed herself differently from ordinary country girls, although retaining the frankness and untutored charm of rustic natures.  She exercised an uneasy fascination over Julien, and at times he returned to the superstitious impression made upon him by Reine’s behavior and discourse in the forest.  He again questioned with himself whether this female form, in its untamed beauty, did not enfold some spirit of temptation, some insidious fairy, similar to the Melusine, who appeared to Count Raymond in the forest of Poitiers.

Most of the time he would himself laugh at this extravagant supposition, but, while endeavoring to make light of his own cowardice, the idea still haunted and tormented him.  Sometimes, in the effort to rid himself of the persistence of his own imagination, he would try to exorcise the demon who had got hold of him, and this exorcism consisted in despoiling the image of his temptress of the veil of virginal purity with which his admiration had first invested her.  Who could assure him, after all, that this girl, with her independent ways, living alone at her farm, running through the woods at all hours, was as irreproachable as he had imagined?  In the village, certainly, she was respected by all; but people were very tolerant—­very easy, in fact—­on the question of morals in this district, where the gallantries of Claude de Buxieres were thought quite natural, where the illegitimacy of Claudet offended no one’s sense of the proprieties, and where the after-dinner conversations, among the class considered respectable, were such as Julien had listened to with repugnance.  Nevertheless, even in his most suspicious moods, Julien had never dared broach the subject to Claudet.

Every time that the name of Reine Vincart had come to his lips, a feeling of bashfulness, in addition to his ordinary timidity, had prevented him from interrogating Claudet concerning the character of this mysterious queen of the woods.  Like all novices in love-affairs Julien dreaded that his feelings should be divined, at the mere mention of the young girl’s name.  He preferred to remain isolated, concentrating in himself his desires, his trouble and his doubts.

Yet, whatever efforts he made, and however firmly he adhered to his resolution of silence, the hypochondria from which he suffered could not escape the notice of the ‘grand chasserot’.  He was not clear-sighted enough to discern the causes, but he could observe the effects.  It provoked him to find that all his efforts to enliven his cousin had proved futile.  He had cudgelled his brains to comprehend whence came these fits of terrible melancholy, and, judging Julien by himself, came to the conclusion that his ennui proceeded from an excess of strictness and good behavior.