ccompanied her downstairs and assisted her in getting into the
carriage, and there I saw her father bent almost double.

Mademoiselle Taillefer tried to stifle his moans by putting her
handkerchief to his mouth; unhappily he saw me; his face became even
more distorted, a convulsive cry rent the air, and he gave me a dreadful
look as the carriage rolled away.

That dinner, that evening exercised a cruel influence on my life and on
my feelings. I loved Mademoiselle Taillefer, precisely, perhaps, because
honor and decency forbade me to marry the daughter of a murderer,
however good a husband and father he might be. A curious fatality
impelled me to visit those houses where I knew I could meet Victorine;
often, after giving myself my word of honor to renounce the happiness
of seeing her, I found myself that same evening beside her. My struggles
were great. Legitimate love, full of chimerical remorse, assumed the
color of a criminal passion. I despised myself for bowing to Taillefer
when, by chance, he accompanied his daughter, but I bowed to him all the
same.

Alas! for my misfortune Victorine is not only a pretty girl, she is
also educated, intelligent, full of talent and of charm, without the
slightest pedantry or the faintest tinge of assumption. She converses
with reserve, and her nature has a melancholy grace which no one can
resist. She loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a
certain smile which she keeps for me alone; for me, her voice grows
softer still. Oh, yes! she loves me! But she adores her father; she
tells me of his kindness, his gentleness, his excellent qualities. Those
praises are so many dagger-thrusts with which she stabs me to the heart.

One day I came near making myself the accomplice, as it were, of the
crime which led to the opulence of the Taillefer family. I was on
the point of asking the father for Victorine's hand. But I fled; I
travelled; I went to Germany, to Andernach; and then--I returned! I
found Victorine pale, and thinner; if I had seen her well in health and
gay, I should certainly have been saved. Instead of which my love
burst out again with untold violence. Fearing that my scruples might
degenerate into monomania, I resolved to convoke a sanhedrim of sound
consciences, and obtain from them some light on this problem of high
morality and philosophy,--a problem which had been, as we shall see,
still further complicated since my return.

Two days ago, therefore, I coll