As usual I doubted my own talent, and to verify the fact that this portrait from memory was really successful to this extent, I went to a shop in the Rue de Rivoli where photographs of famous people were for sale. I asked for one of the fashionable actress. They had a collection of six. I bought them with a blush on my face, a ridiculous timidity considering my age, my profession, and the innocence of the purchase. I waited before examining, them in detail till I was alone beneath the bare chestnuts in the Tuileries on this overcast autumn afternoon, which accorded well with the nostalgia with which I was seized before these portraits. The most charming of them represented Camille in walking dress. It must have been at least two years old, at a period certainly before she became Jacques’ mistress. There was in the eyes and at the lips of this girlish picture a maidenly and somewhat shy expression, the shamefaced nervous reserve of a soul which has not yet given itself—the soul of a child which foresees its destiny and fears it, but desires the mysterious unknown. Two others of these photographs represented the debutante in the two parts she had played at the Odéon. She was the same innocent child, but the determination to succeed had formed a wrinkle between her brows, and there was the light of battle in her eyes; the firm, almost strained fold of the mouth revealed the anxiety of an ambition which doubts itself. The three latter photographs showed in the costume of the Blue Duchess the woman at last born from the child. The revelation of love was displayed by the nostrils which breathed life, and by the eyes in which the flame of pleasure, light and burning, floated; and the mouth had something like a trace, upon its fuller lips, of kisses given and received. Would another day come when other pictures would tell no more of the romance of the artist and lover, but of the venal slave of gallantry, kept by a Tournade, by several Tournades, and forever branded by shameless and profligate luxury. But I always went back to the earliest of these photographs, the one I would have desired, had I been able to meet the living model in that same garden of the Tuileries, on her way to the Conservatoire. Now I could think of her only as she had been before her first stain, such as she would never be again!