Those frightful words, which I knew to be true, I pronounced despairingly as I walked along the Rue François I, over the Invalide’s Bridge, and then along the Avenue de la Tour Maubourg. Transcribing them now, even after such a long period, gives me pain; but it is a dull pain, a tender melancholy. With it is mingled a thoughtful pity, like that which I should feel when standing before Camille’s tomb, instead of the bitter nausea of anger and disgust which seized me when I first realized the certainty of the event. Must I have loved her without knowing it, or at least without knowing how much, for thinking of her as I did to be such a penance! As soon as I reached home, and before going to bed, I wished to looked at the two portraits I had drawn of her: the first of her before she knew Jacques, the one I concealed so carefully; the second of the month previous with an unfinished smile. These two pictures made her so present to me, and made the defilement which sullied her at that moment so real, that I recollect in the solitude of the studio uttering real groans, like those of an animal with a death rattle in its throat. My grief relieved itself by such outbursts that my servant was awakened. I saw with surprise this good fellow enter the room to ask if I were ill and needed his services. It was a grotesque incident which had at least one advantage, it put an end to this period of semi-madness. I should smile at this childishness after so many months if, alas, I did not find in it one more proof of my personal fatality, a sign of that destiny which has always refused me the power to fashion events after my own heart. Idolizing Camille as I did with such tenderness, ought I not to have told her so before? Should not I have arranged so that her first movement, if she desired to raise an impassable barrier between Jacques and herself, would have been to come to me? Who knows? I should then have realized with her the romance of which she had dreamed and which she had failed to realize with Molan! I should have shown such cleverness, such passionate tact, such caressing adoration in dressing her wound, that perhaps one day she would have loved me! Ah, it is the sorrow of “the might have been”! How true those lines of the painter poet Rossetti were of me, and how suitable for my tomb— “Look in my face, my name is: Might have been! I am also called: No more, Too late, Fare thee well.”