ell--we shall
forever love each other. Your wrong to me was not so fatal an act
in itself as the power which I let it have within me. Did I not
tell you I was jealous, jealous unto death? Well, I die of it.
But, be comforted, we have kept all human laws. The Church has
told me, by one of her purest voices, that God will be forgiving
to those who subdue their natural desires to His commandments. My
beloved, you are now to know all, for I would not leave you in
ignorance of any thought of mine. What I confide to God in my last
hour you, too, must know,--you, king of my heart as He is King of
Heaven.

Until the ball given to the Duc d'Angouleme (the only ball at
which I was ever present), marriage had left me in that ignorance
which gives to the soul of a young girl the beauty of the angels.
True, I was a mother, but love had never surrounded me with its
permitted pleasures. How did this happen? I do not know; neither
do I know by what law everything within me changed in a moment.
You remember your kisses? they have mastered my life, they have
furrowed my soul; the ardor of your blood awoke the ardor of mine;
your youth entered my youth, your desires my soul. When I rose and
left you proudly I was filled with an emotion for which I know no
name in any language--for children have not yet found a word to
express the marriage of their eyes with light, nor the kiss of
life laid upon their lips. Yes, it was sound coming in the echo,
light flashing through the darkness, motion shaking the universe;
at least, it was rapid like all these things, but far more
beautiful, for it was the birth of the soul! I comprehended then
that something, I knew not what, existed for me in the world,--a
force nobler than thought; for it was all thoughts, all forces, it
was the future itself in a shared emotion. I felt I was but half a
mother. Falling thus upon my heart this thunderbolt awoke desires
which slumbered there without my knowledge; suddenly I divined all
that my aunt had meant when she kissed my forehead, murmuring,
"Poor Henriette!"

When I returned to Clochegourde, the springtime, the first leaves,
the fragrance of the flowers, the white and fleecy clouds, the
Indre, the sky, all spoke to me in a language till then unknown.
If you have forgotten those terrible kisses, I have never been
able to efface them from my memory,--I am dying of them! Yes, each
tim