“Fatal blindness! I preferred his anger to his indifference! When I had once sinned, I cannot attempt to tell you what took place within me; I tried to deceive myself as to the enormity of my sin; I lived in a never-ending whirl of dissipation, afraid to reflect, doing my utmost to put Henri in the wrong, to convince myself that he had betrayed me a hundred times, and, for all that, realizing perfectly that I had destroyed my own peace of mind forever. When my husband learned the truth, I did not stoop to try to obtain forgiveness by tears. No, I preferred to try to deceive myself still.--Great heaven! what must he have thought of my heart on reading the two letters that I wrote him! A woman who detested him would not have written differently. But, as if I were not already guilty enough, I tried still to make him believe that I felt no repentance for what I had done. I continued to go into society. ‘He will know it,’ I said to myself; ‘he will think that I am happy without him;’ and that thought strengthened me to hold myself in check in the midst of the crowd and to affect a gayety which was so far from my heart. But I knew nothing of his duel and his illness. Those two things, which I learned at almost the same time, made it impossible for me to put any further constraint on myself; it seemed to me that a bandage fell from my eyes. The thought that I might have caused his death terrified me. From that moment the world became hateful to me! I realized the depth of my wrongdoing; when I knew you and heard what you said, I found that I had suspected Henri unjustly, that he really loved me when I believed that he was unfaithful to me. He loved me, and it was by my own fault that I lost his love! Oh! madame, that thought is killing me--and you expect me to cease weeping!” “But why shouldn’t you consent to let us mention you to him, to let us try to move him?” “Oh, no! that is impossible; somebody else has tried it already, and to no purpose, as I have told you. That young woman, Mademoiselle Caroline Derbin, whom he met, I believe, at Mont-d’Or,--that young woman, who thought that he was a bachelor at first, learned, I don’t know how, that he was my husband; then, believing that it was he who had abandoned me, she begged him, implored him, to return to me. I was near them, without their knowing it, in the courtyard of the inn; I overheard all their conversation. He was kind enough also to allow himself to be blamed for wrongs of which he was not guilty; he did not try to disabuse her with regard to me. But, when she begged him to return to me, I heard him say: ‘We are parted forever!’--Ah! those cruel words echoed in the depths of my heart, and I cannot understand why they did not kill me, although I had lost all hope of obtaining forgiveness.”