erre.

"Poor Pierre!" said Clotilde, "what an excellent fellow. But no, really!"

Then he made her smile by telling her what mortal terror and apprehension
had taken possession of his soul at the moment when he was asking her to
decide upon his fate; she had seemed too him, more than ever, at that
moment, a lovely and sainted creature, and so much above him, that his
pretension of being loved by her, of becoming her husband, had suddenly
appeared to him as a pretension almost sacrilegious.

"Oh, mon Dieu!" she said, "what an opinion have you formed of me, then?
It's frightful! On the contrary, I thought myself too simple, too
commonplace for you; I thought that you must be fond of romantic passions,
of great adventures; you have somewhat the appearance of it, and even the
reputation; and I am so far from being a woman of that kind!"

Upon that slight invitation, he told her two events of his past life which
had been full of trite excitement, and had afforded him nothing but
disappointment and disgust. Never, however, before having met her, had the
thought of marrying occurred to him; in the matter of love as in the
matter of friendship, he had always had the imagination taken up with a
certain ideal, somewhat romantic indeed, and he had feared never to find
it in marriage. He might have looked for it elsewhere, in great
adventures, as she said; but he loved order and dignity in life, and he
had the misfortune of being unable to live at war with his own conscience.
Such had been his agitated youth.

"You ask me," he went on with effusion, "why I love you. I love you
because you alone have succeeded in harmonizing within my heart two
sentiments which had hitherto struggled for its mastery at the cost of
fearful anguish; honor and passion. Never before knowing you had I yielded
to one of these sentiments without being made wretched by the other. They
always seemed, irreconcilable to me. Never had I yielded to passion
without remorse; never had I resisted it without regret. Whether weak or
strong, I have always been unhappy and tortured. You alone made me
understand that I could love at once with all the ardor and all the
dignity of my soul; and I selected you because you are affectionate and
you are sincere; because you are handsome and you are pure; because there
are embodied in you both duty and rapture, love and respect, intoxication
and peace. Such is the woman, such is the angel you are to me, Clotilde."

She lis