Thérèse ingenuously believed in him. She abandoned herself to the joy of having caused all that happiness and restored all that grandeur of soul to one of God's elect. She forgot all her apprehensions, or smiled at them as meaningless dreams which she had mistaken for arguments. They laughed at them together; they reproached themselves for having misunderstood each other and for not having thrown themselves on each other's neck the very first day, they were so perfectly adapted to understand, appreciate, and cherish each other. There was no more talk of prudence, no more sermons. Thérèse had grown ten years younger. She was a child, more childish than Laurent himself; she devoted all her energies to the task of arranging his existence so that he would not feel the fold of a rose-leaf. Poor Thérèse! Her intoxication did not last eight whole days. Whence comes that terrible chastisement inflicted on those who have abused the forces of youth, a chastisement which consists in making them incapable of appreciating the joys of a harmonious and logical existence? Is the young man a very great criminal who, being launched in the world without a curb and with boundless aspirations, deems himself capable of exterminating all the phantoms that pass, of mastering all the pleasures that beckon to him? Is his sin anything else than ignorance, and could he have learned in his cradle that life should be a constant battle with one's self? There are some of these young men who are really to be pitied, and whom it is difficult to condemn, some who may have been without a guide, a careful mother, a judicious friend, a sincere first mistress. Vertigo has seized them at the outset; corruption has hurled itself upon them as upon its lawful prey, to make brutes of those who have more senses than heart, to make madmen of those who struggle, as Laurent did, between the mire of reality and the ideal of their dreams. That is what Thérèse said to herself in order to keep on loving that suffering soul, and why she endured the outrages we are about to describe. The seventh day of their happiness was irrevocably the last. That ill-fated figure was never absent from Thérèse's mind. Fortuitous circumstances combined to prolong that eternity of joy throughout a whole week; no one with whom she was intimate had come to see Thérèse, she had no work that was urgent; Laurent promised to set to work afresh as soon as he could resume possession of his studio, then in the hands of workmen who were making certain repairs. The heat in Paris was most oppressive; he proposed to Thérèse that they should pass forty-eight hours in the country, in the woods. It was the seventh day.