Many have suffered the misery of loving without return; Adolphe's torment consists in being loved after he has ceased to love. Eléonore sees through his efforts to appear overjoyed when they meet, and one of those terrible scenes ensues with which Mme. de Staël had made Constant familiar; the exasperation of her passionate nature resembles hatred. An attempt is made by Adolphe's relations, who disapprove of his wasting his youth on such a connection, to get rid of Eléonore. Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness to their daily life. The tender but faint protestations of love made now and again by Adolphe to Eléonore resemble the weak, colourless leaves put forth from the branches of some uprooted tree. He fails to make the being happy who is the cause of so much unhappiness to himself. Every time she feels that she has won new rights, he feels that he is bound by new fetters. Her passionateness makes their daily life one incessant storm. In a biography of Constant we find the following significant sentence: "This year Constant was happy; Mme. de Staël was in Russia." Eléonore inherits her father's fortune and is no longer dependent upon Adolphe's protection. The world now suspects him of deriving pecuniary advantage from the friendship; he is blamed for injuring her reputation by being always in her company, and it is of course impossible for him to explain that it is she who will not live without him. His life is slipping away between his fingers; he is fulfilling none of the promises of his youth; for, as he is not allowed to forget, there is an insurmountable barrier between him and any possible future, and that barrier is Eléonore. He determines to break off with her, but this very determination makes his position more hopeless, for the moment he resolves upon the death sentence (which he is too weak not to postpone) all bitterness leaves him, and he feels such tender compassion for her that she misunderstands and believes that all is well. She makes a final violent effort to win him by rousing his jealousy; but nothing now has any effect; on all sides the rupture is represented to him as the most natural thing in the world, as a duty to his father, to his own future, even to the unhappy being to whom he is chained, and whom he is tormenting. She receives a letter which throws light on his intentions, and soon after is attacked by a fatal fever and dies, proclaiming her devotion to her lover with her last breath.