immediately; accordingly I did, and I was never so
surprised as I was to find him entirely changed from what I had left
him; he was standing in his chamber, his face full of fury, sometimes
walking, sometimes stopping short, as if he had been distracted;
'Come,' says he, 'and see the most forlorn wretch in the world; I am a
thousand times more unhappy than I was a while ago, and what I have
just heard of Madam de Tournon is worse than her death.'

"I took what he said to be wholly the effect of grief, and could not
imagine that there could be anything worse than the death of a mistress
one loves and is beloved by; I told him, that so far as he kept his
grief within bounds, I approved of it, and bore a part in it; but that
I should no longer pity him, if he abandoned himself to despair and
flew from reason. 'I should be too happy if I had lost both my reason
and my life,' cried he; 'Madam de Tournon was false to me, and I am
informed of her unfaithfulness and treachery the very day after I was
informed of her death; I am informed of it at a time when my soul is
filled with the most tender love, and pierced with the sharpest grief
that ever was; at a time when the idea of her in my heart, is that of
the most perfect woman who ever lived, and the most perfect with
respect to me; I find I am mistaken, and that she does not deserve to
be lamented by me; nevertheless I have the same concern for her death,
as if she had been true to me, and I have the same sensibility of her
falsehood, as if she were yet living; had I heard of her falsehood
before her death, jealousy, anger, and rage would have possessed me,
and in some measure hardened me against the grief for her loss; but now
my condition is such, that I am incapable of receiving comfort, and yet
know not how to hate her.'

"You may judge of the surprise I was in at what Sancerre told me; I
asked him how he came by the knowledge of it, and he told me that the
minute I went away from him, Etouteville, who is his intimate friend,
but who nevertheless knew nothing of his love for Madam de Tournon,
came to see him; that as soon as he was sat down, he fell a-weeping,
and asked his pardon for having concealed from him what he was going to
tell him, that he begged him to have compassion of him, that he was
come to open his heart to him, and that he was the person in the world
the most afflicted for the death of Madam de Tournon.

"'That name,' said Sancerre, 'so astonished me,