Camille (La Dame aux Camilias)

Hence those great devotions, those austere retreats from the world, of

which some of them have given an example.

But when the man who inspires this redeeming love is great enough in

soul to receive it without remembering the past, when he gives himself

up to it, when, in short, he loves as he is loved, this man drains at

one draught all earthly emotions, and after such a love his heart will

be closed to every other.

I did not make these reflections on the morning when I returned home.

They could but have been the presentiment of what was to happen to

me, and, despite my love for Marguerite, I did not foresee such

consequences. I make these reflections to-day. Now that all is

irrevocably ended, they a rise naturally out of what has taken place.

But to return to the first day of my liaison. When I reached home I

was in a state of mad gaiety. As I thought of how the barriers which my

imagination had placed between Marguerite and myself had disappeared, of

how she was now mine; of the place I now had in her thoughts, of the key

to her room which I had in my pocket, and of my right to use this key, I

was satisfied with life, proud of myself, and I loved God because he had

let such things be.

One day a young man is passing in the street, he brushes against a

woman, looks at her, turns, goes on his way. He does not know the woman,

and she has pleasures, griefs, loves, in which he has no part. He does

not exist for her, and perhaps, if he spoke to her, she would only laugh

at him, as Marguerite had laughed at me. Weeks, months, years pass, and

all at once, when they have each followed their fate along a different

path, the logic of chance brings them face to face. The woman becomes

the man's mistress and loves him. How? why? Their two existences are

henceforth one; they have scarcely begun to know one another when it

seems as if they had known one another always, and all that had gone

before is wiped out from the memory of the two lovers. It is curious,

one must admit.

As for me, I no longer remembered how I had lived before that night.

My whole being was exalted into joy at the memory of the words we had

exchanged during that first night. Either Marguerite was very clever

in deception, or she had conceived for me one of those sudden passions

which are revealed in the first kiss, and which die, often enough, as

suddenly as they were born.