pronounce the most solemn promises without knowing their purport or to
what they bound her. The crushed, the dead woman, so to speak, the
sinner to be reinstated, seemed to me sublime; she incited the special
generosities of a man's nature; she demanded all the treasures of the
heart, all the resources of strength; she filled his life and gave the
zest of a conflict to happiness; whereas Amelie, chaste and confiding,
would settle down into the sphere of peaceful motherhood, where the
commonplace must be its poetry, and where my mind would find no
struggle and no victory.

"Of the plains of Champagne and the snowy, storm-beaten but sublime
Alps, what young man would choose the chalky, monotonous level? No;
such comparisons are fatal and wrong on the threshold of the Mairie.
Alas! only the experience of life can teach us that marriage excludes
passion, that a family cannot have its foundation on the tempests of
love. After having dreamed of impossible love, with its infinite
caprices, after having tasted the tormenting delights of the ideal, I
saw before me modest reality. Pity me, for what could be expected! At
five-and-twenty I did not trust myself; but I took a manful
resolution.

"I went back to the Count to announce the arrival of his relations,
and I saw him grown young again in the reflected light of hope.

"'What ails you, Maurice?' said he, struck by my changed expression.

"'Monsieur le Comte----'

"'No longer Octave? You, to whom I shall owe my life, my
happiness----'