‘If you really love me for myself,’ she said, ‘you will want me to be yours and yours only.’

Two months later I received an effusive letter, and a few moments after reading it I was on my way to her flat. A friend whom I met in the street gave me this precious bit of information: the young man I had met at the club had just joined the Algerian cavalry.

The next summer Aurelia and her companions gave a performance at the Chantilly race meeting and I made myself as agreeable as possible to the manager. He had played Dorante in Marivaux’s comedies and the lover’s part in many dramas, and his latest success was in the play after the manner of Schiller, when he looked so wizened. At close range he seemed much younger, and being slender he was able to produce quite an effect in the provinces, for he still had plenty of vivacity. I had succeeded in getting him to give performances at Senlis and Dammartin, for I had become attached to the company as Chief Poet: he was at first in favour of Compiègne, but Aurelia had agreed with me. The following day, while they were dealing with the authorities and obtaining a theatre, I hired some horses and we rode out past the lakes of Comelle to have lunch at the Château of Queen Blanche. Dressed in her riding-habit, and with her hair streaming out in the wind, Aurelia rode through the wood like a queen of bygone days, to the great bewilderment of the peasantry, who had never seen any one, since Madame de F—, so imposing or so gracious. After lunch we went to some neighbouring villages, so like those of Switzerland, with sawmills run by the waters of the Nonette. These places, full of precious memories for me, awakened only a mild interest in Aurelia, and even when I took her to the green lawn in front of the château near Orry, where I had first seen Adrienne, she was unmoved. So I told her how my love had been awakened by that slender figure bathed in mist and moonlight, and how, since then, that love had lived only in my dreams, now to be realized in her. She was gravely attentive, and when I had finished speaking she said, ‘You don’t love me at all! You’re only waiting for me to tell you that the actress and the nun are the same person. All you want is a drama, and the climax evades you. I’ve lost my faith in you completely!’

A flash of the truth came to me as she spoke. This extraordinary passion that had possessed me for so long, these dreams and these tears, this despair and this tenderness, perhaps it wasn’t love at all? But then where was love to be found?

Aurelia played that evening at Senlis, and it seemed to me that she showed rather a fondness for the manager, the wizened lover. He was an extremely upright man, and he had been very useful to her. One day she spoke of him to me, ‘If you want to see someone who really loves me, there he is!’

XIV. The Last Leaves

Such are the vagaries that beguile and disturb the morning of life, and though there seems to be little order in what I have written here, I know there are those who will understand me. Illusions fall away from us one after the other, and experience is like a fruit that may not be tasted until the skin is removed.

Its flavour is often bitter, but there is something invigorating in bitterness. (I hope these old phrases will be forgiven.)

Rousseau says that to look upon Nature is consolation for everything, and I sometimes go in search of my favourite grove at Clarens, lost in the mists to the north of Paris, but there is nothing there to stir my memory. All is changed.

Ermenonville!—where they still read Gessner’s ancient idyl, translated for the second time—no longer will your twofold radiance fall upon me, blue or rose, like Aldebaran’s elusive star; now Adrienne, now Sylvie, the two objects of a single passion, an unachieved ideal and a sweet reality. Your shady groves, your lakes, and even your solitudes, what are they to me now? Othys, Montagny, Loisy, your humble neighbours, and Chaâlis now being restored: they have kept nothing of the past. Sometimes the need rises up within me to revisit these places of silence and meditation, and sadly to evoke the fugitive memories of a time when my affectation was to be natural; and I often smile on reading the once admired lines of Roucher cut into the surface of a rock, or a benevolent saying carved on a fountain or above the entrance