en you everything. I would have sold all, worked
for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile,
for a look, to hear you say 'Thanks!' And you sit there quietly in your
arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,
and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was
it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah!
it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with
your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you
swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you
held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for
the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my
heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to
implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and
bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would
cost him three thousand francs!"

"I haven't got them," replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with
which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.

She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she
passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead
leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in
front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to
open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling,
she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive
chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the
windows of the facade.

She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself
than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear
bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth
beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed
to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her
head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of
fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux's closet, their room at home,
another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and
managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did
not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was
in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her
love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; a