t be worth to ask where are the leaves of autumn which the
evening breeze carried away last year.

"But where are the snows of yester-year?"

What! already, it is finished! And yet he had sworn to love her always.
Yes, but she also had sworn to be always amiable. Which of the two first
forfeited the oath?

There has been then a tragedy, a drama, despair, tears? Nonsense! Those who
had sworn to die one for the other, one fine day parted as strangers.

The charming young girl whom you saw passing by, proud and radiant on the
arm of that artless stripling, see, here she comes, a little weary, a
little faded, but still charming, on the arm of that cynical Bohemian.

That poetical school-girl, who smiled and scattered daisies on the head of
her lover, as he knelt before her, has become the adored wife of a dull
tallow-chandler; and the other one, who took the ivy for her emblem, and
who said to her sweetheart: "I cling till death!" has clung to and
separated from half-a-dozen others without dying, and has finished by
fastening herself to a rheumatical old churchwarden, peevish but
substantial.

And the lover? He is no better: he has loved twenty since; the deep sea of
oblivion has passed between them, and among so many vanished mistresses,
can he precisely remember her name?

Suzanne did not say all this to herself, she was ignorant of the whirlpools
of life, but she felt instinctively that she was about to be precipated
into an abyss.

She was not perverse, she was merely frivolous and coquettish, but she had
received a vicious education. Her imagination only had been corrupted, her
heart had remained till then untainted. It was a good ear of corn which
somehow or another had made its way into the field of tares.

She reproached herself bitterly therefore for the shameful facility with
which she had yielded herself to the priest, and she sought for an excuse
to try and palliate her fault in her own eyes.

But she was unable to discover any genuine excuses. A young girl is
pardoned for yielding herself to her lover in a moment of forgetfulness and
excitement, because she hopes that marriage will atone for her fault.

But what had she to claim? What could she expect from this Cure?

Again a young wife is pardoned for deceiving an old husband, or a husband
who is worthless, debauched and brutal, and for seeking a friend abroad
whom she cannot find at her fire-side; but she? Whom had she deceived? Her
father, who