nd kissed her adieu. Then I went away with a tranquil heart,
promising myself that I would henceforth enjoy my happiness and allow
nothing to disturb it.

But the next day Brigitte said to me, as if quite by chance:

"I have a large book in which I have written my thoughts, everything
that has occurred to my mind, and I want you to see what I said of you
the first day I met you."

We read together what concerned me, to which we added a hundred foolish
comments, after which I began to turn the leaves in a mechanical way.
A phrase written in capital letters caught my eye on one of the pages I
was turning; I distinctly saw some words that were insignificant enough,
and I was about to read the rest when Brigitte stopped me and said:

"Do not read that."

I threw the book on the table.

"Why, certainly not," I said, "I did not think what I was doing."

"Do you still take things seriously?" she asked, smiling, doubtless
seeing my malady coming on again; "take the book, I want you to read
it."

The book lay on the table within easy reach and I did not take my eyes
from it. I seemed to hear a voice whispering in my ear, and I thought
I saw, grimacing before me, with his glacial smile and dry face,
Desgenais. "What are you doing here, Desgenais?" I asked as if I really
saw him. He looked as he did that evening, when he leaned over my table
and unfolded to me his catechism of vice.

I kept my eyes on the book and I felt vaguely stirring in my memory some
forgotten words of the past. The spirit of doubt hanging over my head
had injected into my veins a drop of poison; the vapor mounted to
my head and I staggered like a drunken man. What secret was Brigitte
concealing from me? I knew very well that I had only to bend over and
open the book; but at what place? How could I recognize the leaf on
which my eye had chanced to fall?

My pride, moreover, would not permit me to take the book; was it indeed
pride? "O God!" I said to myself with a frightful sense of sadness, "is
the past a spectre? and can it come out of its tomb? Ah! wretch that I
am, can I never love?"

All my ideas of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity
which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my
mind; and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a
parade of them, now it seemed that they were real, or at least that they
had been.

I had known Madame Pierson four months, but I knew nothing of her pa