She listened to him without replying, for she was
thinking of the other; she thought she was listening
to the other, and thought she felt him leaning against
her, in a kind of hallucination. She saw only
him, and did not remember that any other man existed
on earth, and when her ears trembled at those three
syllables: “I love you,” it was he,
the other man, who uttered them, who kissed her hands,
who strained her to his breast, like the other had
done shortly before in the cab. It was he who
pressed victorious kisses on her lips, it was his lips,
it was he whom she held in her arms and embraced,
whom she was calling to, with all the longings of
her heart, with all the over-wrought ardor of her body.
When she awoke from her dream, she uttered a terrible
cry. Captain Fracasse was kneeling by her, and
thanking her, passionately, while he covered her disheveled
hair with kisses, and she almost screamed out:
“Go away! go away! go away!”
And as he did not understand what she meant, and tried
to put his arm round her waist again, she writhed,
as she stammered out:
“You are a wretch, and I hate you! Go away!
go away!” And he got up in great surprise, took
up his hat, and went.
The next day she returned to Val de Cire, and
her husband, who had not expected her for some time,
blamed her for a freak.
“I could not live away from you any longer,”
she said.
He found her altered in character, and sadder than
formerly, but when he said to her:
“What is the matter with you? You seem
unhappy. What do you want?” she replied:
“Nothing. Happiness exists only in our
dreams, in this world.”
Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she
received him without any emotion, and without regret,
for she suddenly perceived that she had never loved
him, except in a dream, from which Paul Peronel had
brutally roused her.
But the young man, who still adored her, thought as
he returned to Paris:
“Women are really very strange, complicated
and inexplicable beings.”
When the first fine spring days come, and the earth
awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the
perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and
fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our
heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness,
a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.
As the winter had been very severe the year before,
this longing assumed an intoxicating feeling in May;
it was like a superabundance of sap.
Well, one morning on waking, I saw from my window
the blue sky glowing in the sun above the neighboring
houses. The canaries hanging in the windows were
singing loudly, and so were the servants on every floor;
a cheerful noise rose up from the streets, and I went
out, with my spirits as bright as the day was, to
go—I did not exactly know where. Everybody
I met seemed to be smiling; an air of happiness appeared
to pervade everything, in the warm light of returning
spring. One might almost have said that a breeze
of love was blowing through the city, and the young
women whom I saw in the streets in their morning toilettes,
in the depths of whose eyes there lurked a hidden
tenderness, and who walked with languid grace, filled
my heart with agitation.
