This unfortunate singularity of his nature would, under any circumstances, have made a meeting with Madame de Carlsberg very painful, even though the dearest friend of his youth had not been concerned in it. And he would never have heard that his friend loved without being deeply moved. He knew he was so tender-hearted, so defenceless, so vulnerable! Here, again, he was the victim of a retrospective sensitiveness. Friendship carried to the extreme point that his feeling for Hautefeuille occupied is a sentiment of the eighteenth rather than of the thirty-second year. In the first flush of youth, when the soul is all innocence, freshness, and purity, these fervent companionships, these enthusiasms of voluntary fraternity, these passionate, susceptible, absolute friendships, often appear to quickly fade away. Later in life self-interest and experience individualize one and isolation is unavoidable. Complete communion of soul with soul becomes possible only by the sorcery of love, and friendship ceases to suffice. It is relegated to the background with those family affections that once also occupied a unique place in the child and in the youth. Certain men there are, however, and Olivier was one of the number, upon whom the impression made by friendships about their eighteenth year has been too deep, too ineffaceable, and, above all, too delicate, to be ever forgotten, and even to be ever equalled. It remains an incomparable sentiment. These men, like Olivier, may pass through burning passions, suffer all the feverish shocks of love, be bruised in the most daring intrigues, but the true romance of their sensitive natures is not to be found in these passions. It is to be found in those hours of life when, in thought, they project themselves into the future with an ideal companion, with a brother that they have chosen, in whose society they realize for an instant La Fontaine's sublime fable, the complete union of mind, tastes, hopes:-- "And one possess'd nothing that the other did not share."