, silky, golden mane enveloping me and caressing my skin. I was
never tired of hearing her disdainful, petulant voice, those vibrations
which sounded as if they proceeded from clear glass, and that music,
which at times, became hoarse, harsh and fierce, like the loud, sonorous
calls of the Valkyries.

"Oh! Good heavens! to be her lover, to be her chattel, to belong to her,
to devote one's whole existence to her, to spend one's last half-penny
and to go under in misery, only to have the glory, the happiness of
possessing the splendid beauty, the sweetness of her kisses, the pink,
and the white of her demon-like soul all to myself, were it only for a
few months!

"It makes you laugh, I know, to think that I should have been caught
like that, I who give such good, prudent advice to my friends, who fear
love as I do those quicksands and shoals which appear at low tide and in
which one is swallowed up and disappears!

"But who can answer for himself, who can defend himself against such a
danger, against the magnetic attraction that comes from such a woman?
Nevertheless, I got cured, and perfectly cured, and that, quite
accidentally, and this is how the enchantment, which was apparently so
infrangible, was broken.

"On the first night of a play, I was sitting in the stalls close to
Lucy, whose mother had accompanied her, as usual, and they occupied the
front of a box, side by side. From some insurmountable attraction, I
never ceased looking at the woman whom I loved with all the force of my
being. I feasted my eyes on her beauty, I saw nobody except her in the
theater, and did not listen to the piece that was being performed on the
stage.

"Suddenly, however, I felt as if I had received a blow from a dagger in
my heart, and I had an insane hallucination. Lucy had moved and her
pretty head was in profile, in the same attitude and with the same lines
as her mother. I do not know what shadow, or what play of light had
hardened and altered the color of her delicate features and destroyed
their ideal prettiness, but the more I looked at them both, the one who
was young, and the one who was old, the greater that distressing
resemblance became.

"I saw Lucy growing older and older, striving against those accumulating
years which bring wrinkles in the face, produce a double chin and crow's
feet, and spoil the mouth. _They almost looked like twins._

"I suffered so that I almost thought I should have gone mad, and, in
spite o