the letters a moment, and look at them. The ashes of
life! All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater
than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well. These letters,
these unintelligible flowers, these bits of lace and of paper, what are
they? Around these flimsy things what is there left? We are handling
the casket together. Thus we are completely attached in the hollow of
our hands.

* * * * * *

And yet we went on reading.

But something strange is growing gradually greater; it grasps us, it
surprises us hopelessly--every letter speaks of the _future_.

In vain Marie said to me:

"What about afterwards? Try another--later on."

Every letter said, "In a little while, how we shall love each other
when our time is spent together! How beautiful you will be when you
are always there. Later on we'll make that trip again; after a while
we'll carry that scheme out, later on . . ."

"That's all we could say!"

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time so
far from each other, and that we were unhappy.

"Ah!" said Marie, in a sort of terror, "we wrote that! And
afterwards . . ."

After, the letter from which we expected all, said:

"Soon we shan't leave each other any more. At last we shall live!"
And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . .

"And afterwards?"

"After that, there's nothing more . . . it's the last letter."

* * * * * *

There is nothing more. It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealing
the truth. There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the
paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not
got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we
turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for
the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret,
both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is
exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live;
we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that
thing which never is--and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon the
chair.

I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and
at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."

"It's love!" Marie answers.

I do not