Then she would stand before the mirror arraying herself as though for a ball, affecting a coquetry that she was far from feeling, trying to adopt my tone, laughing and skipping about the room. "Am I to your taste?" she would ask. "Which one of your mistresses do I resemble? Am I beautiful enough to make you forget that any one can believe in love? Have I a sufficiently careless air to suit you?" Then in the midst of that factitious joy, she would turn her back and I could see her shudder until the flowers she had placed in her hair trembled. I threw myself at her feet. "Stop!" I cried, "you resemble only too closely, that which you try to imitate, that which my mouth has been so vile as to conjure up before you. Lay aside those flowers and that dress. Let us wash away such mimicry with a sincere tear; do not remind me that I am but a prodigal son; I remember the past too well." But even this repentance was cruel as it proved to her that the fantoms in my heart were full of reality. In yielding to an impulse of horror, I merely gave her to understand that her resignation and her desire to please me only served to call up an impure image. And it was true; I reached her side transported with joy, swearing that I would regret my past life; on my knees, I protested my respect for her; then a gesture, a word, a trick of turning as she approached me, recalled to my mind the fact that such and such a woman had made that gesture, had used that word, had that same trick of turning. Poor devoted soul! What didst thou suffer in seeing me turn pale before thee, in seeing my arms fall as though lifeless at my side! When the kiss died on my lips, and the full glance of love, that pure ray of God's light, fled from my eyes like an arrow turned by the wind! Ah! Brigitte! what diamonds trickled from thin eyes! What treasures of charity didst thou exhaust with patient hand! How pitiful thy love! For a long time, good and bad days succeeded each other almost regularly; I showed myself alternately cruel and scornful, tender and devoted, insensible and haughty, repentant and submissive. The face of Desgenais which had at first appeared to me, as though to warn me whither I was drifting, was now constantly before me. On my days of doubt and coldness, I conversed, so to speak, with him, often when I had offended Brigitte by some cruel mockery I said to myself: "If he were in my place he would do as I do!" And then, at other times, when putting on my hat to go to see Brigitte, I would look in my glass and say: "What is there so terrible about it, anyway? I have, after all, a pretty mistress; she has given herself to a libertine, let her take me for what I am." I reached her side with a smile on my lips, I sank into a chair with an air of deliberate insolence; then I saw Brigitte approach, her large eyes filled with tenderness and anxiety; I seized her little hands in mine and lost myself in an infinite dream.