my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they
have called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are
only bearable provided we do not think about them.

[Illustration: 049]

[Illustration: 050]

5th July

It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front
of a toyshop in the Champs-Elysees, the child of her who first awakened
in me the sense of beauty.

I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was
unknown to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love.
The first time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert
to which her father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had
heard the finest orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her
attired in stately weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only
served to accentuate her radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in
me feelings which bore, I think, a close resemblance to religious
exaltation. I was no longer very young. The uncertainty of my worldly
position, dependent as it then was upon the vicissitudes of a political
party, combined with my natural timidity to deprive me of all hope of
figuring as a successful suitor. I often saw her at her father's and she
treated me with an air of open friendliness that did not encourage me to
foster higher ambitions. It was clear I did not impress her as the sort
of man with whom she could fall in love. As for me, the sight of her
and the sound of her voice produced in me such a state of delicious
agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled though it be with grief,
still avails to make me in love with life.

[Illustration: 052]

Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her
always; I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain
to wed her. No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my
heart. "It was not love then," some one will say. I know not what it
was, but I know that it filled my soul.

Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange
to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life;
then, one day, she told me she was going to be m