ue, the air pure, life
delightful--my talent was not dead.

"After this first effort, I slackened a little! Madame de Bergenheim's
face, which I had seen but dimly during this short time, returned to me
in a less vaporous form; I took extreme delight in calling to mind the
slightest circumstances of our meeting, the smallest details of her
features, her toilette, her manner of walking and carrying her head.
What had impressed me most was the extreme softness of her dark eyes,
the almost childish tone of her voice, a vague odor of heliotrope with
which her hair was perfumed; also the touch of her hand upon my arm.
I sometimes caught myself embracing myself in order to feel this last
sensation again, and then I could not help laughing at my thoughts,
which were worthy of a fifteen-year-old lover.

"I had felt so convinced of my powerlessness to love, that the thought
of a serious passion did not at first enter my mind. However, a
remembrance of my beautiful traveller pervaded my thoughts more and
more, and threatened to usurp the place of everything else. I then
subjected myself to a rigid analysis; I sought for the exact location
of this sentiment whose involuntary yoke I already felt; I persuaded
myself, for some time yet, that it was only the transient excitement of
my brain, one of those fevers of imagination whose fleeting titillations
I had felt more than once.

"But I realized that the evil, or the good--for why call love an
evil?--had penetrated into the most remote regions of my being, and I
realized the energy of my struggle like a person entombed who tries to
extricate himself. From the ashes of this volcano which I had believed
to be extinct, a flower had suddenly blossomed, perfumed with the most
fragrant of odors and decked with the most charming colors. Artless
enthusiasm, faith in love, all the brilliant array of the fresh
illusions of my youth returned, as if by enchantment, to greet this
new bloom of my life; it seemed to me as if I had been created a second
time, since I was aided by intelligence and understood its mysteries
while tasting of its delights. My past, in the presence of this
regeneration, was nothing more than a shadow at the bottom of an abyss.
I turned toward the future with the faith of a Mussulman who kneels with
his face toward the East--I loved!

"I returned to Paris, and applied to my friend Casorans, who knows the
Faubourg Saint-Germain from Dan to Beersheba.

"'Madame de Berg