I was the only boy at this dance and I had taken Sylvie with me, a little girl from the next hamlet. She was so alive and so fresh, with her black eyes, her clearly cut profile and delicately tanned complexion!…I loved no one but her, I had eyes for no one else—until then!…I saw a tall and beautiful light-haired girl in the ring where we were dancing, one whom they called Adrienne. All at once, by the rules of the dance, we found ourselves alone in the middle of the ring. We were of the same height; we were told to kiss each other, and the dancing and singing became livelier than ever.…I pressed her hand when I kissed her, and I felt the light touch of long golden ringlets upon my cheeks. From that moment a strange uneasiness took possession of me.

Adrienne had to sing that she might have the right to rejoin the dance. We sat in a circle about her and she began at once in the clear and delicately modulated voice peculiar to the young girls of that misty country. Her song was one of those old-time ballads, full of passionate sadness, that always tell of the misfortunes of a princess imprisoned in her tower for having loved. At the end of each stanza the melody passed into one of those quivering trills that young throats can make so much of, when, by means of a restrained shudder, they simulate the trembling voices of their grandmothers.

Twilight came down from the great trees around us as the song drew to a close, and the light of the rising moon fell upon her, alone in the midst of our listening circle; then she stopped and none of us dared to break the silence. A faint white mist spread itself over the lawn and rested upon the tips of the grass; we thought ourselves in Paradise.…At last I got up and ran to where there were some laurels planted in tall earthenware vases, and brought back two branches which had been woven into a crown and tied with ribbon. I placed this ornament upon Adrienne’s head, and its shiny foliage caught the pale gleam of the moon. She was like Dante’s Beatrice smiling at him as he wandered on the borders of heaven.

Then she got up, and making us a graceful curtsey, which showed us her slender figure, she ran across the lawn into the château. They said she was the granddaughter of one of the descendants of a family related to the ancient kings of France; the blood of the Valois ran in her veins. For this day of festivities she had been allowed to join in our games, but we were not to see her again, for she was returning the following morning to her convent school.

Sylvie was crying when I returned to her, and I found that the reason for her tears was the crown I had given to Adrienne. I offered to get her another, but she refused, saying she was unworthy of it. I tried to defend myself, but she did not speak to me again that evening.

When I returned to Paris to continue my studies, my mind was divided between a tender friendship that had come to an end, and a vague, impossible love enveloping me with painful thoughts which a schoolboy’s philosophy was powerless to disperse.

But Adrienne triumphed in the end—a mirage of beauty and nobility, that lightened or shared the severity of my studies. During the next summer’s holiday I learned that, in obedience to her family’s wishes, she had entered the convent.

III. Resolution

Everything was made clear to me by this half-dreamed memory. This unreasonable and hopeless love I had conceived for an actress, that took possession of me every evening at the time of the play, only to set me free at bedtime, had its origin in the memory of Adrienne, a flower of the night that opened to the pale moon, a youthful apparition, half-bathed in mist, gliding across the grass. The almost-forgotten features were now singularly clear, and it was as though a pencil sketch, dimmed by time, had become a painting; first the master’s rough study and then the splendid finished picture.

To love a nun in the guise of an actress! And what if they were one and the same! That possibility leads to madness, but it is an inevitable impulse—the unknown beckons like the will-o’-the-wisp fading through the rushes in a still pool. But we must cling to realities.