onsolation: and at the end of two cold and artificial pages
I added in a hurry a few phrases of ardour or of tenderness
suited to deceive her afresh. In this way, never saying
enough to satisfy her, I always said enough to mislead her,
a species of double-dealing the very success of which was
against my wishes and prolonged my misery.

This situation, however, does not last. Unable to bear his absence, and
half puzzled, half pained by his letters, Ellenore follows him, and his
father for the first time expresses displeasure at this compromising
step. Ellenore being threatened with police measures, Adolphe is once
more perforce thrown on her side, and elopes with her to neutral
territory. Then events march quickly. Her father's Polish property, long
confiscated, is restored to him and left to her. She takes Adolphe
(still struggling between his obligations to her and his desire to be
free) to Warsaw, rejects an offer of semi-reconciliation from the Count
de P----, grows fonder and more exacting the more weary of her yoke her
lover becomes; and at last, discovering his real sentiments from a
correspondence of his with an artful old diplomatic friend of his
father's, falls desperately ill and dies in his arms. A prologue and
epilogue, which hint that Adolphe, far from taking his place in the
world (from which he had thought his _liaison_ debarred him), wandered
about in aimless remorse, might perhaps be cut away with advantage,
though they are defensible, not merely on the old theory of political
justice, but on sound critical grounds.

[Sidenote: Mme. de Duras's "postscript."]

[Sidenote: _Sensibilite_ and _engouement_.]

This was the end of sensibility in more senses than one. It is true
that, five years later than _Adolphe_, appeared Madame de Duras's
agreeable novelettes of _Ourika_ and _Edouard_, in which something of
the old tone revives. But they were written late in their author's life,
and avowedly as a reminiscence of a past state of sentiment and of
society. "Le ton de cette societe," says Madame de Duras herself, "etait
l'engouement." As happy a sentence, perhaps, as can be anywhere found to
describe what has been much written about, and, perhaps it may be said
without presumption, much miswritten about. _Engouement_ itself is a
nearly untranslatable word.[413] It may be clumsily but not inaccurately
defined as a state of fanciful interest in persons and things which is
rather more