e, returned to me
in a less vaporous form; I took extreme delight in calling to mind the
slightest circumstances of our meeting, the smallest details of her
features, her toilette, her manner of walking and carrying her head. What
had impressed me most was the extreme softness of her dark eyes, the
almost childish tone of her voice, a vague odor of heliotrope with which
her hair was perfumed; also the touch of her hand upon my arm. I
sometimes caught myself embracing myself in order to feel this last
sensation again, and then I could not help laughing at my thoughts, which
were worthy of a fifteen-year-old lover.

"I had felt so convinced of my powerlessness to love, that the thought of
a serious passion did not at first enter my mind. However, a remembrance
of my beautiful traveller pervaded my thoughts more and more, and
threatened to usurp the place of everything else. I then subjected myself
to a rigid analysis; I sought for the exact location of this sentiment
whose involuntary yoke I already felt; I persuaded myself, for some time
yet, that it was only the transient excitement of my brain, one of those
fevers of imagination whose fleeting titillations I had felt more than
once.

"But I realized that the evil, or the good--for why call love an
evil?--had penetrated into the most remote regions of my being, and I
realized the energy of my struggle like a person entombed who tries to
extricate himself. From the ashes of this volcano which I had believed to
be extinct, a flower had suddenly blossomed, perfumed with the most
fragrant of odors and decked with the most charming colors. Artless
enthusiasm, faith in love, all the brilliant array of the fresh illusions
of my youth returned, as if by enchantment, to greet this new bloom of my
life; it seemed to me as if I had been created a second time, since I was
aided by intelligence and understood its mysteries while tasting of its
delights. My past, in the presence of this regeneration, was nothing more
than a shadow at the bottom of an abyss. I turned toward the future with
the faith of a Mussulman who kneels with his face toward the East--I
loved!

"I returned to Paris, and applied to my friend Casorans, who knows the
Faubourg Saint-Germain from Dan to Beersheba.

"'Madame de Bergenheim,' he said to me, 'is a very popular society woman,
not very pretty, perhaps, rather clever, though, and very amiable. She is
one of our coquettes of the old nobility, and with her