Then I told her all; I revealed the hidden spring of that love which haunted my dreams by night and was realized in her. She listened with attention and said: "You do not love me! You expect me to say 'the actress and the nun are the same'; you are merely arranging a drama and the issue of the plot is lacking. Go! I no longer believe in you." Her words were an illumination. The unnatural enthusiasm which had possessed me for so long, my dreams, my tears, my despair and my tenderness,--could they mean aught but love? What then is love? Aurélie played that night at Senlis, and I thought she displayed a weakness for the director, the wrinkled "young lover" of the stage. His character was exemplary, and he had already shown her much kindness. One day, Aurélie said to me: "There is the man who loves me!" XIV. THE LAST LEAF. Such are the fancies that charm and beguile us in the morning of life! I have tried to set them down here, in a disconnected fashion, but many hearts will understand me. One by one our illusions fall like husks, and the kernel thus laid bare is experience. Its taste is bitter, but it yields an acrid flavour that invigorates,--to use an old-fashioned simile. Rousseau says that the aspect of nature is a universal consolation. Sometimes I seek again my groves of Clarens lost in the fog to the north of Paris, but now, all is changed! Hermenonville, the spot where the ancient idyl blossomed again, transplanted by Gessner, thy star has set, the star that glowed for me with two-fold lustre. Blue and rose by turns, like the changeful Aldebaran, it was formed by Adrienne and Sylvie, the two halves of my love. One was the sublime ideal, the other, the sweet reality. What are thy groves and lakes and thy desert to me now? Othys, Montagny, Loiseaux, poor neighbouring hamlets, and Chaâlis now to be restored, you guard for me no treasures of the past. Occasionally, I feel a desire to return to those scenes of lonely musing, where I sadly mark the fleeting traces of a period when affectation invaded nature; sometimes I smile as I read upon the granite rocks certain lines from Boucher, which I once thought sublime, or virtuous maxims inscribed above a fountain or a grotto dedicated to Pan. The swans disdain the stagnant waters of the little lakes excavated at such an expense. The time is no more when the hunt of Condé swept by with its proud riders, and the forest-echoes rang with answering horns! There is to-day no direct route to Hermenonville, and sometimes I go by Creil and Senlis, sometimes by Dammartin.