places where she had spent her youth; the buildings of Rome; the
mountains of the old Papal States, the canals of Venice--relics of the
past which no doubt were of great value to her because they called up
the image of her husband. And among these papers he saw dry, crushed
flowers, proud roses, or modest wild flowers, withered leaves, nameless
souvenirs whose importance Renovales realized, suspecting that they
recalled some happy moment completely forgotten by him.

The artist's portraits, at different ages, rose from all the corners,
entangled among belts or buried under the piles of handkerchiefs. Then
several bundles of letters appeared, the ink reddened with time, written
in a hand that made the artist uneasy. He recognized it; it was dimly
associated in his memory with some person whose name had escaped him.
Fool! It was his own handwriting, the laborious heavy hand of his youth
which was dexterous only with the brush. There in those yellow folds was
the whole story of his life, his intellectual efforts to say "pretty
things" like men who write. Not one was missing; the letters of their
early engagement when, after they had seen and talked to each other,
they still felt that they must put on paper what their lips did not
venture to say; others with Italian stamps, exuberant with extravagant
expressions of love, short notes he sent her when he was going to spend
a few days with some other artists at Naples, or to visit some dead
city in the Marcha; then the letters from Paris to the old Venetian
palace, inquiring anxiously for the little girl, asking about the
nursing, trembling with fear at the possibility of the inevitable
diseases of childhood.

Not one was lacking; all were there, put away like fetishes, perfumed
with love, tied up with ribbons like the balsam and swathings of a
mummified life. Her letters had had a different fate, her written love
had been scattered, lost in the void. They had been left forgotten in
old suits, burned in the fireplaces, or had fallen into strange hands,
where they provoked laughter at their tender simplicity. The only
letters he kept were a few of the other woman's and, as he thought of
this, he was seized with remorse, with infinite shame at his evil
doings.

He read the first lines of some of them, with a strange feeling, as if
they were written by another man, wondering at their passionate tone.
And it was he who had written that! How he loved Josephina then! It did
not s