e disdained Hugo, scorned Lamartine, who usually touched his emotions,
and fell eagerly upon Musset, the poet of youth. He took the volume and
carried it to bed, to read whatever he might chance to find.

When he had settled himself in bed, he began to drink, as with the
thirst of a drunkard, those flowing verses of an inspired being who
sang, like a bird, of the dawn of existence, and having breath only for
the morning, was silent in the arid light of day; those verses of a
poet who above all mankind was intoxicated with life, expressing his
intoxication in fanfares of frank and triumphant love, the echo of all
young hearts bewildered with desires.

Never had Bertin so perfectly comprehended the physical charm of those
poems, which move the senses but hardly touch the intelligence. With his
eyes on those vibrating stanzas, he felt that his soul was but twenty
years old, radiant with hopes, and he read the volume through in a state
of youthful intoxication. Three o'clock struck, and he was astonished to
find that he had not yet grown sleepy. He rose to shut his window and to
carry his book to a table in the middle of the room; but at the contact
of the cold air a pain, of which several seasons at Aix had not cured
him, ran through his loins, like a warning or a recall; and he threw
aside the poet with an impatient movement, muttering: "Old fool!" Then
he returned to bed and blew out his light.

He did not go to see the Countess the next day, and he even made the
energetic resolution not to return there for two days. But whatever
he did, whether he tried to paint or to walk, whether he bore his
melancholy mood with him from house to house, his mind was everywhere
harassed by the preoccupation of those two women, who would not be
banished.

Having forbidden himself to go to see them, he solaced himself by
thinking of them, and he allowed both mind and heart to give themselves
up to memories of both. It happened often that in that species of
hallucination in which he lulled his isolation the two faces approached
each other, different, such as he knew them; then, passing one before
the other, mingled, blended together, forming only one face, a little
confused, a face that was no longer the mother's, not altogether that
of the daughter, but the face of a woman loved madly, long ago, in the
present, and forever.

Then he felt remorse at having abandoned himself to the influence of
these emotions, which he knew were power