the
first day I met you."

We read together what concerned me, to which we added a hundred foolish
comments, after which I began to turn the leaves in a mechanical way. A
phrase written in capital letters caught my eye on one of the pages I was
turning; I distinctly saw some words that were insignificant enough, and
I was about to read the rest when Brigitte stopped me and said:

"Do not read that."

I threw the book on the table.

"Why, certainly not," I said, "I did not think what I was doing."

"Do you still take things seriously?" she asked, smiling, doubtless
seeing my malady coming on again; "take the book, I want you to read it."

The book lay on the table within easy reach and I did not take my eyes
from it. I seemed to hear a voice whispering in my ear, and I thought I
saw, grimacing before me, with his glacial smile and dry face, Desgenais.
"What are you doing here, Desgenais?" I asked as if I really saw him. He
looked as he did that evening, when he leaned over my table and unfolded
to me his catechism of vice.

I kept my eyes on the book and I felt vaguely stirring in my memory some
forgotten words of the past. The spirit of doubt hanging over my head had
injected into my veins a drop of poison; the vapor mounted to my head and
I staggered like a drunken man. What secret was Brigitte concealing from
me? I knew very well that I had only to bend over and open the book; but
at what place? How could I recognize the leaf on which my eye had chanced
to fall?

My pride, moreover, would not permit me to take the book; was it indeed
pride? "O God!" I said to myself with a frightful sense of sadness, "is
the past a spectre? and can it come out of its tomb? Ah! wretch that I
am, can I never love?"

All my ideas of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity
which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my mind;
and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a parade
of them, now it seemed that they were real, or at least that they had
been.

I had known Madame Pierson four months, but I knew nothing of her past
life and had never questioned her about it. I had yielded to my love for
her with confidence and without reservation. I found a sort of pleasure
in taking her just as she was, for just what she seemed, while suspicion
and jealousy are so foreign to my nature that I was more surprised at
feeling them toward Brigitte than she was in discovering them in me.