I was not rich enough to help her; Desgenais, at my request, interested himself in the poor creature; he made her learn over again all of which she had a slight knowledge.  But she could make no appreciable progress.  When her teacher left her she would fold her arms and for hours look silently across the public square.  What days!  What misery!  One day I threatened that if she did not work she should have no money; she silently resumed her task, and I learned that she stole out of the house a few minutes later.  Where did she go?  God knows.  Before she left I asked her to embroider a purse for me.  I still have that sad relic, it hangs in my room, a monument of the ruin that is wrought here below.

But here is another case: 

It was about ten in the evening when, after a riotous day, we repaired to Desgenais’s, who had left us some hours before to make his preparations.  The orchestra was ready and the room filled when we arrived.

Most of the dancers were girls from the theatres.

As soon as we entered I plunged into the giddy whirl of the waltz.  That delightful exercise has always been dear to me; I know of nothing more beautiful, more worthy of a beautiful woman and a young man; all dances compared with the waltz are but insipid conventions or pretexts for insignificant converse.  It is truly to possess a woman, in a certain sense, to hold her for a half hour in your arms, and to draw her on in the dance, palpitating in spite of herself, in such a way that it can not be positively asserted whether she is being protected or seduced.  Some deliver themselves up to the pleasure with such modest voluptuousness, with such sweet and pure abandon, that one does not know whether he experiences desire or fear, and whether, if pressed to the heart, they would faint or break in pieces like the rose.  Germany, where that dance was invented, is surely the land of love.

I held in my arms a superb danseuse from an Italian theatre who had come to Paris for the carnival; she wore the costume of a Bacchante with a robe of panther’s skin.  Never have I seen anything so languishing as that creature.  She was tall and slender, and while dancing with extreme rapidity, had the appearance of allowing herself to be led; to see her one would think that she would tire her partner, but such was not the case, for she moved as if by enchantment.

On her bosom rested an enormous bouquet, the perfume of which intoxicated me.  She yielded to my encircling arms as would an Indian vine, with a gentleness so sweet and so sympathetic that I seemed enveloped with a perfumed veil of silk.  At each turn there could be heard a light tinkling from her metal girdle; she moved so gracefully that I thought I beheld a beautiful star, and her smile was that of a fairy about to vanish from human sight.  The tender and voluptuous music of the dance seemed to come from her lips, while her head, covered with a wilderness of black tresses, bent backward as if her neck was too slender to support its weight.