to pursue you, and the bell so prompt to call you back to your aunt’s watchful eye, in the great dining- room?’

Madame de Cosmelly interrupted Samuel by a sigh, made as if to open her lips, no doubt to beg him to stop, but he had already resumed.

‘The most desolating thing of all,’ he said, ‘is that every love always ends badly, all the more badly the more divine, the more winged was its beginning. There is no dream, however ideal, which one does not rediscover with a greedy brat fastened to its breasts; there is no retreat, no cottage however delightful and secluded which the pickaxe does not raze to the ground. And yet this destruction is quite material: but there is another, more pitiless and more secret, which attacks invisible things. Imagine at the moment when you lean upon the being of your choice and say: “Let us flee together and seek the depths of the sky!” an implacable and serious voice broods over your ear to tell you that our passions are liars, that it is our short-sightedness that creates the beautiful faces, and our ignorance the beautiful souls, and that necessarily there comes a day when the idol, for more clairvoyant eyes, is now a mere object, not of hatred, but of contempt and astonishment.’

‘For mercy’s sake sir!’ said Madame de Cosmelly.

At the same time she was moved; Samuel had noticed that he had thrust the steel into an old wound, and he persisted cruelly.

‘Madame,’ he said, ‘the salutary sufferings of the memory have their charms, and, in this intoxication of grief, one sometimes finds a solace. At this funereal warning, all loyal souls would cry: “Lord, take me hence with my dream intact and pure: I want to give back to nature my passion with all its virginity, and carry elsewhere my unwithered crown”. Besides, the results of disillusion are terrible. The sickly children of a dying love are sad debauch and hideous impotence; debauch of the mind, impotence of the heart, the result of which is that the one no longer lives save from curiosity, and the other pines away daily from lassitude. All of us resemble more or less some traveller who has traversed a great country, and each evening watches the sun, which once superbly gilded the beauties of the route, go down in a drab horizon. Resignedly, he sits down on dirty hills covered with unknown litter and says to the perfumes of the heather that it is no use their rising towards the empty heaven; to the sparse and wretched seeds that it is no use sprouting in a dried-up soil; to the birds which think their marriages blessed by someone, that they are wrong to build nests in a country swept by cold and violent winds. Sadly he goes on his way towards a desert which he knows is similar to that just traversed, escorted by a pale ghost called Reason, which, with pale lantern, lights the aridity of his road, and, to quench the ever rising thirst of passion that seizes him from time to time, pours into him the poison of ennui.’

Suddenly, hearing a deep sigh and a repressed sob, he turned again towards Madame de Cosmelly. She was weeping copiously and had no longer the strength to hide her tears.

For some time he considered her in silence, with the most sympathetic and the most unctuous air he could assume: the brutal and hypocritic actor was proud of those beautiful tears; he considered them as his work and his literary property. He was mistaken as to the inward meaning of this grief, just as Madame de Cosmelly, drowned in this candid desolation, was mistaken as to the purport of his look. It was a peculiar play of misunderstandings, as a result of which Samuel Cramer, with a decisive gesture, stretched out both his hands, which she took with tender confidence.

‘Madame,’ continued Samuel, after some moments of silence, the classic silence of emotion, ‘true wisdom consists less in malediction than in hope. Without the truly divine gift of hope, how could we cross the hideous desert of ennui which I have just described to you? The ghost which accompanies us is really a ghost of reason; one can drive him away by sprinkling him with the holy water of the first theological virtue. There is an amiable philosophy which contrives to find consolations in the apparently most unworthy objects. Just as virtue is better than innocence, and as there is more merit in sowing a desert than in carelessly rifling the sweets of a fruitful orchard, so it is really worthy of a choice soul to purify itself and