"If a supernatural power said to me: Break the glass of that watch and Léonore will be for you, what she was three years ago, an indifferent friend--really I believe I would never as long as I live have the courage to break it." I saw in these discourses such signs of madness, that I never had the courage to offer my former objections. He would add: "Just as Luther's Reformation at the end of the Middle Ages, shaking society to its base, renewed and reconstructed the world on reasonable foundations, so is a generous character renewed and retempered by love. "It is only then, that he casts off all the baubles of life; without this revolution he would always have had in him a pompous and theatrical _something_. It is only since I began to love that I have learnt to put greatness into my character--such is the absurdity of education at our military academy. "Although I behaved well, I was a child at the Court of Napoleon and at Moscow. I did my duty, but I knew nothing of that heroic simplicity, the fruit of entire and whole-hearted sacrifice. For example, it is only this last year, that my heart takes in the simplicity of the Romans in Livy. Once upon a time, I thought them cold compared to our brilliant colonels. What they did for their Rome, I find in my heart for Léonore. If I had the luck to be able to do anything for her, my first desire would be to hide it. The conduct of a Regulus or a Decius was something confirmed beforehand, which had no claim to surprise them. Before I loved, I was small, precisely because I was tempted sometimes to think myself great; I felt a certain effort, for which I applauded myself.