Father Dodu sat with us for a long time over a bottle of ratafia. Once he paused between two verses of a song he was singing and said, ‘All men are the same to me. I drink with a pastry-cook as I would drink with a prince!’

‘And where is the pastry-cook?’ I asked.

‘This young man wants to go into the business.’ Then Curly-head blushed, and I understood everything.

I was fated to have a foster-brother in this place made illustrious by Rousseau (Rousseau who reproved the use of wet-nurses!). Father Dodu told me that Sylvie would probably marry Curly-head, and that he wanted to open a confectioner’s shop at Dammartin. I asked no more questions, and the next day the Nanteuil-le-Haudoin coach took me back to Paris.

XIII. Aurelia

To Paris!…The coach would take five hours, but I only wanted to be there for the evening, and eight o’clock found me in my usual seat. The play, the work of a poet of the day, and faintly reminiscent of Schiller, owed much to Aurelia’s inspired reading of her lines, and in the garden scene she was astonishing. She did not appear in the fourth act, and I went out to Madame Prévost’s to buy her a bouquet. In it I put a very affectionate letter, signed Un Inconnu, saying to myself that I now had something settled for the future. The next morning I started for Germany. And why did I do this? To bring order into the confusion of my thoughts. If I were to write a novel about a man in love with two women at once, what chance would I have of getting it accepted? Sylvie had slipped away from me, and though I had no one to blame for this but myself, it had taken only a day to rekindle my love for her. Now she was for me a statue in the Temple of Wisdom, whose placid smile had caused me to hesitate at the edge of an abyss. And it seemed inconceivable to offer myself to Aurelia, to join that company of commonplace lovers who fluttered like moths into a consuming flame.

We shall see one day, I said, whether she has a heart or not, and it was not long before I read in the papers that Aurelia was ill. I wrote to her from the mountains of Salzburg, but my letter was so full of Germanic mysticism that I hardly expected it to have much success; there could be no answer, for I had not signed my name, and I put my faith in Chance and…l’Inconnu.

Months went by while I was writing a poetic drama about the painter Colonna’s love for Laura, whose family had placed her in a convent, and whom he had loved till the end of his days; there was something in this subject akin to my own perplexities. When I had finished the last line I began to think about returning to France.

What can I say now that will not be the story of most of my fellow-beings? I passed, circle by circle, into the Purgatory which we call the theatre; ‘I ate of the drum and drank of the cymbal,’ as runs the senseless phrase of the initiates of Eleusis. It means, no doubt, that when the need arises one must go beyond the boundaries of nonsense and absurdity. For me it was a question of achieving my ideal and of making it permanent.

Aurelia accepted the leading part in the drama I had brought back with me from Germany, and I shall never forget the day when she let me read it to her. It was she who had inspired the love scenes, and consequently there was true feeling in my rendering of them. Then I disclosed the identity of l’Inconnu of the two letters, and she said, ‘You are quite mad, but come and see me again. I am still waiting to find the man who knows how to love me.’

Oh, woman! It is love you are seeking? And I? The letters I wrote her then must have been more exquisite and more moving than any she had ever received, but her replies did not exceed the limits of friendship. One day, however, her emotions were stirred, and she summoned me to her boudoir to tell me of an attachment from which it would be very difficult to extricate herself.