, which you are so much
surprised at.

Madam de Cleves read this letter, and read it over again several times,
without knowing at the same time what she had read; she saw only that
the Duke de Nemours did not love her as she imagined and that he loved
others who were no less deceived by him than she. What a discovery was
this for a person in her condition, who had a violent passion, who had
just given marks of it to a man whom she judged unworthy of it, and to
another whom she used ill for his sake! Never was affliction so
cutting as hers; she imputed the piercingness of it to what had
happened that day, and believed that if the Duke de Nemours had not had
ground to believe she loved him she should not have cared whether he
loved another or not; but she deceived herself, and this evil which she
found so insupportable was jealousy with all the horrors it can be
accompanied with. This letter discovered to her a piece of gallantry
the Duke de Nemours had been long engaged in; she saw the lady who
wrote it was a person of wit and merit, and deserved to be loved; she
found she had more courage than herself, and envied her the power she
had had of concealing her sentiments from the Duke de Nemours; by the
close of the letter, she saw this lady thought herself beloved, and
presently suspected that the discretion the Duke had showed in his
addresses to her, and which she had been so much taken with, was only
an effect of his passion for this other mistress, whom he was afraid of
disobliging; in short, she thought of everything that could add to her
grief and despair. What reflections did she not make on herself, and
on the advices her mother had given her I how did she repent, that she
had not persisted in her resolution of retiring, though against the
will of Monsieur de Cleves, or that she had not pursued her intentions
of acknowledging to him the inclination she had for the Duke of
Nemours! She was convinced, she would have done better to discover it
to a husband, whose goodness she was sensible of, and whose interest it
would have been to conceal it, than to let it appear to a man who was
unworthy of it, who deceived her, who perhaps made a sacrifice of her,
and who had no view in being loved by her but to gratify his pride and
vanity; in a word, she found, that all the calamities that could befall
her, and all the extremities she could be reduced to, were less than
that single one of having discovered to the Duke de