I left Jacques after this jesting remark which I laughed at him with a gaiety sufficiently well simulated for the strange pain I was stifling to escape his irony. Here was my cowardice again, my grievous inconsequence of heart which was always the same in spite of experience, in spite of resolution, and in spite of age! I had run after my friend all the afternoon to beg him not to slight his poor friend by abandoning her so brutally. I had come to the theatre to exhort Camille not to judge her lover as she did, for her possible vengeance had moved me with anxiety to the depths of my soul. I ought then to rejoice at their reconciliation. So much the better if Madam de Bonnivet’s coquetry had produced naturally a result which without doubt my counsel would not. But it was not so. The fact of the actress pardoning with the facility of a true lover wounded me in a still unsuspected place, and the thought of their appointment on the morrow was more painful still. I could see them in each other’s arms, with the help of that terribly precise imagination which a painter’s craft develops in him. This unsupportable vision made me admit the sad truth. I was jealous, jealous without hope, and the right to be so, with a childish, grotesque and unacceptable jealousy. I was about to enter, I had entered into that hell of false sentiments in which one feels the worst of passion’s sorrow without tasting any of its joys. How well I knew that cursed path! In the course of my love affairs, which were as incomplete and incoherent as the rest of my existence, I had already experienced this dangerous situation more than once. I had been the too tender friend of a woman who was in love with some one else, but never with the sudden emotion, with the troubled ardour in the sympathy which Camille Favier inspired in me. I was afraid, so I concluded a solemn compact with myself. I took my hand and said aloud: “I give my word of honour to myself I will keep my door shut all the week, and I will neither go to see Jacques, nor to the theatre, nor to the Rue de la Barouillére. I will work and cure myself.”