e the infinite pleasure of
being able to enjoy her caresses without any ill feeling, and to be able
to love her, as she loves me. And if I must expiate my old faults, and
this infamous doubt which I am ashamed of not being immediately able to
cast from me, if I must pay for my unmerited happiness with usury, I
hope that I may be given to death as a prey, only provided that I might
belong to her, idolize her, believe in her kisses, believe in her beauty
and in her love, for one hour, for even a few moments!

PART XVIII

To-day I suddenly remembered a funny evening which I spent when I was a
bachelor, at Madame d'Ecoussens, where all of us, some with secret and
insurmountable agony, and others with absolute indifference, went into
one of the small rooms where a female professor of palmistry, who was
then in vogue, and whose name I have forgotten, had installed herself.

When it came to my turn to sit opposite to her, as if I had been going
to make my confession, she took my hands into her long, slender fingers,
felt them, squeezed them and triturated them, as if they had been a lump
of wax, which she was about to model into shape.

Severely dressed in black, with a pensive face, thin lips and almost
copper-colored eyes and neither young nor old, this woman had something
commanding, imperious, disturbing about her, and I must confess that my
heart beat more violently than usual while she looked at the lines in my
left hand through a strong magnifying glass, where the mysterious
characters of some satanic conjuring look appear, and form a capital M.

She was interesting, occasionally discovered fragments of my past and
gave mysterious hints, as if her looks were following the strange roads
of Destiny in those unequal, confused curves. She told me in brief words
that I should have and had had some opportunities, that I was wasting my
physical, more than my moral strength in all kinds of love affairs that
did not last long, and that the day when I really loved, or when, to
use her expression, I was fairly caught, would be to me the prelude of
intense sufferings, a real way of the Cross and of an illness of which I
should never be cured. Then, as she examined my line of life, that which
surrounds the thick part of the thumb, the lady in black suddenly grew
gloomy, frowned and appeared to hesitate to go on to the end and
continue my horoscope, and said very quickly:

"Your line of life is magnificent, monsieur; you will