r of the millinery shop in which she worked
at Tours. She had smiled at me with singular persistence, and I caught
her head in my hands, kissed her on the lips--and found out suddenly
that I loved her.

I no longer recall the strange bliss we felt when, we first embraced.
It is true, there are moments when I still desire her as madly as the
first time. This is so especially when she is away. When she is with
me, there are moments when she repels me.

We discovered each other in the holidays. The days when we shall see
each other again before we die--we could count them--if we dared.

To die! The idea of death is decidedly the most important of all
ideas. I should die some day. Had I ever thought of it? I reflected.
No, I had never thought of it. I could not. You can no more look
destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is
grey.

And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which
will be too vast.

But all at once I jumped up and stood on my feet, reeling, my heart
throbbing like the fluttering of wings.

What was it? In the street a horn resounded, playing a hunting song.
Apparently some groom of a rich family, standing near the bar of a
tavern, with cheeks puffed out, mouth squeezed tight, and an air of
ferocity, astonishing and silencing his audience.

But the thing that so stirred me was not the mere blowing of a horn in
the city streets. I had been brought up in the country, and as a child
I used to hear that blast far in the distance, along the road to the
woods and the castle. The same air, the same thing exactly. How could
the two be so precisely alike?

And involuntarily my hand wavered to my heart.

Formerly--to-day--my life--my heart--myself! I thought of all this
suddenly, for no reason, as if I had gone mad.

. . . . .

My past--what had I ever made of myself? Nothing, and I was already on
the decline. Ah, because the refrain recalled the past, it seemed to
me as if it were all over with me, and I had not lived. And I had a
longing for a sort of lost paradise.

But of what avail to pray or rebel? I felt I had nothing more to
expect from life. Thenceforth, I should be neither happy nor unhappy.
I could not rise from the dead. I would grow old quietly, as quiet as
I was that day in the room where so many people had left their traces,
and yet no one had left his own traces.

This room--anywhere you turn, you find this room. It is t