"I have been that friend to you because you are yourself, my dear Pierre," replied Olivier, in a tone of absolute sincerity. "Besides, the senses have no place in friendship. They have a big one in love, and my senses are cruel. I have always suffered from evil desires, from wicked voluptuousness. And I cannot tell you what leaven of ferocity has worked in the deepest depths of my soul every time that my desires have been strongly aroused.--I do not justify myself. I do not explain the mystery. It exists, that is all. And all my _liaisons_, from the first to the last, have been poisoned by this strange, fermenting mixture of hatred." "Yes," he went on, "from the first to the last.--Above all, the last!--It was at Rome, two years ago. If ever I thought I could love it was at that time. In that unique city I met a woman, herself unique, different from the others, with so much unflinching courage in her mind, so much charm in her heart, without any meanness, without any smallness, and beautiful!--Ah! so beautiful!--And then our pride clashed and wounded us both. She had had lovers before me.--One at least, whom I was sure about.--He was a Russian, and had been killed at Plevna. I knew she had loved him. And although he was no more, that unreasoning jealousy, the unjust, inexpressible jealousy of the dead, made me cruel toward the unhappy woman, even before our first rendezvous, from our first kisses!--I treated her brutally.--She was proud and coquettish. She avenged herself for my cruelty. She accepted another lover without dismissing me--or I thought she did, which amounts to the same thing.--In any case she made me suffer so horribly that I left her, the first. I left her abruptly one day without even saying farewell, swearing that never again would I seek satisfaction in that way. "I was at the middle of my life. From the passionate experiences I had tasted, all that remained to me was such a poverty of sentiment, such a singular interior distortion, if I may so explain myself, such a terrible weariness of my mode of life, that I made a sudden resolution to change it, certain that nothing would be, nothing could be, worse.--There are marriages of calculation, of sentiment, of convenience, of reason. I made a marriage of weariness.--I don't think that such cases are rare. But it is much more rare for one to admit having made such a marriage. I admit it.--I never had but one originality. I was never hypocritical with myself. I hope to die without having lost the quality.--There you have my story." "And yet you seemed to love your _fiancée_," said Pierre. "If you had not loved her, or if you had not thought you loved her, you, the honorable friend, whom I know so well, would never have linked your life with hers."