ld not have been a pure woman.

I ought to have cast off that intoxication which was bewitching me, and
to have rushed out of the room where such a lie was being consummated; I
ought to have profited by her moments of amiable weakness, while she was
incapable of collecting her thoughts, when she would with tears have
confessed an old fault, for which the unhappy girl had not, perhaps,
been altogether responsible. Perhaps by my entreaties, or even perhaps
by violence, in terror at my furious looks, when my features would have
been distorted by rage, and my hands clenched in spite of myself in a
gesture of menace and of murder, I might have forced her to open her
heart, to show me its defilement, and to tell me this sad love episode.

How do I know whether her disconsolateness might not have moved me to
pity, whether I should not have wept with her at the heavy cross that we
both of us had to bear, whether I should not have forgiven her and
opened my arms wide, so that she might have thrown herself into them
like into a peaceful refuge?

Would not any man, or vicious collegian on the lookout for innocent
girls, have perceived her nervousness, her vice? Would he not have
hypnotized her, as it were, by amorous touches, by skillful caresses and
reduced her to the absolute passiveness of an animal, who had been taken
unawares, without any care for the morrow, or what the consequences of
such a fault might be?

Or was I completely her dupe and the dupe of a villain? Had she loved,
and did she still love the man who had first possessed her, who had been
her first lover? Who could tell me, or come to my aid? Who could give me
the proofs, the real, undeniable proofs, either that I was an infamous
wretch to suspect Elaine, whom I ought to have worshiped with my eyes
shut, or that she was guilty, that she had lied, and that I had the
right to cast her out of my life and to treat her like a worthless
woman!

PART XIII

If I had married when I was quite young, before I had wallowed in the
mire of Paris, from which one can never afterwards free oneself, for
heart and body both retain indelible marks of it, if I had not been the
plaything of a score of mistresses, who disgusted me with belief in any
woman, if I had not been weaned from supreme illusions, and surfeited
with everything to the marrow, should I have these abominable ideas?

I waited almost until I was beginning to decline in life, before I took
the right path and