Just re-read the above. In speaking so of Azaïs, it is myself that I render odious. I am fully aware of it, and add these few lines for Bernard’s sake, in case his charming indiscretion leads him to poke his nose again into this note-book. He has only to go on frequenting him a little longer in order to understand what I mean. I like the old fellow very much, and “moreover,” as he says, I respect him; but when I am with him I have the greatest difficulty in containing myself; this doesn’t tend to make me enjoy his society. I like his daughter, the pastoress, very much. Madame Vedel is like Lamartine’s Elvire--an elderly Elvire. Her conversation is not without charm. She has a frequent habit of leaving her sentences unfinished, which gives her reflections a kind of poetic vagueness. She reaches the infinite by way of the indeterminate and the indefinite. She expects from a future life all that is lacking to her in this one; this enables her to enlarge her hopes boundlessly. The very narrowness of her taking-off ground adds strength to her impetus. Seeing Vedel so rarely enables her to imagine that she loves him. The worthy man is incessantly on the go, in request on all sides, taken up by a hundred and one different ploys--sermons, congresses, visits to the sick, visits to the poor. He can only shake your hand in passing, but it is with all the greater cordiality. “Too busy to talk to-day.” “Never mind; we shall meet again in Heaven,” say I; but he hasn’t had time to hear me. “Not a moment to himself,” sighs Madame Vedel. “If you only knew the things he gets put on his shoulders now that.... As people know that he never refuses anything, everyone.... When he comes home at night, he is sometimes so tired that I hardly dare speak to him for fear of.... He gives so much of himself to others that there’s nothing left for his own family.” And while she was speaking I remembered some of Vedel’s home-comings at the time I was staying at the pension. I sometimes saw him take his head between his hands and pant aloud for a little respite. But even then I used to think he feared a respite even more than he longed for it, and that nothing more painful could have been accorded him than a little time in which to reflect. “You’ll take a cup of tea, won’t you?” asked Madame Vedel, as a little maid brought in a loaded tray. “There’s not enough sugar, Ma’am.” “Haven’t I said that you must tell Miss Rachel about it? Quick!... Have you let the young gentlemen know tea’s ready?” “Mr. Bernard and Mr. Boris have gone out.” “Oh! And Mr. Armand?... Make haste.” Then, without waiting for the maid to leave the room: “The poor girl has just arrived from Strasburg. She has no.... She has to be told everything.... Well! What are you waiting for now?” The maid-servant turned round like a serpent whose tail has been trodden on: “The tutor’s downstairs; he wanted to come up. He says he won’t go till he’s been paid.”