No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau

under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he had

the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting

on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded

into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly

placed a distance between them.

To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the

bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters

from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered

roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a

handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he

had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature

given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her

languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this

image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma's features little

by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the

painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other.

Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations

relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business

notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In

order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the

others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and

things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and

hair--hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box,

broke when it was opened.

Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style

of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or

jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love,

others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain

gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered

nothing at all.

In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each

other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalised

them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself

for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into

his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to

the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed

up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,

had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that

which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like

them, leave a name carved upon the wall.




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