there was no mercy. Well, and I am dying, dying with stupendous
courage. No courtesan was ever more gay than I. My poor Octave is
happy; I let his love feed on the illusions of my heart. I throw all
my powers into this terrible masquerade; the actress is applauded,
feasted, smothered in flowers; but the invisible rival comes every day
to seek its prey--a fragment of my life. I am rent and I smile. I
smile on two children, but it is the elder, the dead one, that will
triumph! I told you so before. The dead child calls me, and I am going
to him.

"'The intimacy of marriage without love is a position in which my
soul feels degraded every hour. I can never weep or give myself up to
dreams but when I am alone. The exigencies of society, the care of my
child, and that of Octave's happiness never leave me a moment to
refresh myself, to renew my strength, as I could in my solitude. The
incessant need for watchfulness startles my heart with constant
alarms. I have not succeeded in implanting in my soul the sharp-eared
vigilance that lies with facility, and has the eyes of a lynx. It is
not the lip of one I love that drinks my tears and kisses them; my
burning eyes are cooled with water, and not with tender lips. It is my
soul that acts a part, and that perhaps is why I am dying! I lock up
my griefs with so much care that nothing is to be seen of it; it must
eat into something, and it has attacked my life.

"'I said to the doctors, who discovered my secret, "Make me die of
some plausible complaint, or I shall drag my husband with me."

"'So it is quite understood by M. Desplein, Bianchon, and myself that
I am dying of the softening of some bone which science has fully
described. Octave believes that I adore him, do you understand? So I