Camille (La Dame aux Camilias)

From that time forward, I often met Marguerite at the theatre or in

the Champs-Elysees. Always there was the same gaiety in her, the same

emotion in me.

At last a fortnight passed without my meeting her. I met Gaston and

asked after her.

"Poor girl, she is very ill," he answered.

"What is the matter?"

"She is consumptive, and the sort of life she leads isn't exactly the

thing to cure her. She has taken to her bed; she is dying."

The heart is a strange thing; I was almost glad at hearing it.

Every day I went to ask after her, without leaving my name or my card. I

heard she was convalescent and had gone to Bagneres.

Time went by, the impression, if not the memory, faded gradually from my

mind. I travelled; love affairs, habits, work, took the place of other

thoughts, and when I recalled this adventure I looked upon it as one of

those passions which one has when one is very young, and laughs at soon

afterward.

For the rest, it was no credit to me to have got the better of this

recollection, for I had completely lost sight of Marguerite, and, as I

told you, when she passed me in the corridor of the Varietes, I did not

recognise her. She was veiled, it is true; but, veiled though she might

have been two years earlier, I should not have needed to see her in

order to recognise her: I should have known her intuitively. All the

same, my heart began to beat when I knew that it was she; and the two

years that had passed since I saw her, and what had seemed to be the

results of that separation, vanished in smoke at the mere touch of her

dress.