"Positively, dearest, indignation is as becoming to you as one of Madame Baudrand's bonnets; you never looked so beautiful. Come, my angel, my feminine Don Juan, let us deceive yesterday's lovers and those of to-morrow, let us commit one more infidelity in honour of the poor dear marquis--" At first she looked at me with amazement, then, with a heartrending cry, she repulsed me violently, and disappeared in her bedroom, locking the door after her. I came home like a drunken man. I had only a confused recollection of what had taken place. That night I was taken ill with a violent attack of fever. I was delirious all night long. The next day my valet handed me a sealed package. It contained the letters I had written to Marguerite. "Who brought this?" I said to him. "Mlle. Vandeuil, monsieur, at two o'clock this morning." "And Madame de Pënâfiel?" "Madame la marquise started off last night in her carriage. Her people do not know her destination." CHAPTER XXVI AN ENCOUNTER It would be useless to tell of all my remorse and regret after the departure of Madame de Pënâfiel. I went over again (only on another theme) all the tortures which followed my rupture with Hélène. Only, before I finally renounced for ever that noble girl, there remained to me the hope of at some time obtaining her hand; while now I knew I should never see Marguerite again. As it always happens, the affection she had shown me appeared in all its intoxicating sweetness when I had lost it for ever, and by a fatal contradiction I knew that I loved her more passionately than ever. I dwelt with a sort of cruel enjoyment on all I had so unworthily sacrificed, not to distrust, but to a species of monomania as wicked as it was stupid; to be sure, it had brought terrible suffering on me, but what of that? A crazy man suffers, too; but is the harm he does any the less harmful? What more can I say? The vision of that seductive woman appeared more beautiful, more voluptuous, than ever before. The saddening vulgarity of the saying that we only know the worth of happiness when we have lost it, was the dolorous theme upon which my despair played every sort of variation. Overcome by such crushing regrets, what could I do? Alas! when a man is of such an unfortunate disposition that neither love, ambition, study, nor social obligations suffice to occupy his mind and his heart, above all, when he despises or misunderstands that beneficent spiritual nourishment which religion offers him as a salutary and never failing aliment, his soul, thus deprived of all life-giving principles, reacts upon itself. Then nameless chagrins, mournful and pale ennui, gnawing doubts, phantoms of despair, are almost always born of these gloomy, solitary, and sickly nocturnal meditations.