Camille (La Dame aux Camilias)

Mme. Arnould asked us if we would take a boat, and Marguerite and

Prudence accepted joyously.

People have always associated the country with love, and they have done

well; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as

the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude

of fields, or woods. However much one loves a woman, whatever confidence

one may have in her, whatever certainty her past may offer us as to her

future, one is always more or less jealous. If you have been in love,

you must have felt the need of isolating from this world the being in

whom you would live wholly. It seems as if, however indifferent she may

be to her surroundings, the woman whom one loves loses something of her

perfume and of her unity at the contact of men and things. As for me, I

experienced that more than most. Mine was not an ordinary love; I was

as much in love as an ordinary creature could be, but with Marguerite

Gautier; that is to say, that at Paris, at every step, I might elbow

the man who had already been her lover or who was about to, while in

the country, surrounded by people whom we had never seen and who had no

concern with us, alone with nature in the spring-time of the year, that

annual pardon, and shut off from the noise of the city, I could hide my

love, and love without shame or fear.

The courtesan disappeared little by little. I had by me a young and

beautiful woman, whom I loved, and who loved me, and who was called

Marguerite; the past had no more reality and the future no more clouds.

The sun shone upon my mistress as it might have shone upon the purest

bride. We walked together in those charming spots which seemed to have

been made on purpose to recall the verses of Lamartine or to sing the

melodies of Scudo. Marguerite was dressed in white, she leaned on my

arm, saying over to me again under the starry sky the words she had said

to me the day before, and far off the world went on its way, without

darkening with its shadow the radiant picture of our youth and love.

That was the dream that the hot sun brought to me that day through the

leaves of the trees, as, lying on the grass of the island on which we

had landed, I let my thought wander, free from the human links that had

bound it, gathering to itself every hope that came in its way.