ped, and retaken, in which I told her my life and my occupations; I
even described my apartment in Paris, for she wished to know everything;
and (happiness then unappreciated) I had nothing to conceal. Knowing
thus my soul and all the details of a daily life full of incessant toil,
learning the full extent of my functions, which to any one not sternly
upright offered opportunities for deception and dishonest gains, but
which I had exercised with such rigid honor that the king, I told her,
called me Mademoiselle de Vandenesse, she seized my hand and kissed it,
and dropped a tear, a tear of joy, upon it.

This sudden transposition of our roles, this homage, coupled with the
thought--swiftly expressed but as swiftly comprehended--"Here is the
master I have sought, here is my dream embodied!" all that there was of
avowal in the action, grand in its humility, where love betrayed itself
in a region forbidden to the senses,--this whirlwind of celestial things
fell on my heart and crushed it. I felt myself too small; I wished to
die at her feet.

"Ah!" I said, "you surpass us in all things. Can you doubt me?--for you
did doubt me just now, Henriette."

"Not now," she answered, looking at me with ineffable tenderness, which,
for a moment, veiled the light of her eyes. "But seeing you so changed,
so handsome, I said to myself, 'Our plans for Madeleine will be defeated
by some woman who will guess the treasures in his heart; she will steal
our Felix, and destroy all happiness here.'"

"Always Madeleine!" I replied. "Is it Madeleine to whom I am faithful?"

We fell into a silence which Monsieur de Mortsauf inconveniently
interrupted. I was forced to keep up a conversation bristling with
difficulties, in which my honest replies as to the king's policy jarred
with the count's ideas, and he forced me to explain again and again the
king's intentions. In spite of all my questions as to his horses, his
agricultural affairs, whether he was satisfied with his five farms,
whether he meant to cut the timber of the old avenue, he returned to the
subject of politics with the pestering faculty of an old maid and the
persistency of a child. Minds like his prefer to dash themselves against
the light; they return again and again and hum about it without ever
getting into it, like those big flies which weary our ears as they buzz
upon the glass.

Henriette was silent. To stop the conversation, in which I feared
my young blood might take fire,