I saw the time of my return to the château approach with pleasure. At least I could live there among my memories. But a terrible blow awaited me, which was given me by the marquis on my arrival. “Good news,” said he as soon as he saw me. “Charlotte is better. And there is more just as good. She is going to be married. Yes, she accepts M. de Plane. It is true, you do not know him, a friend of André whom she refused once, and now she is willing.” And he continued, going back to himself as usual: “Yes, it is very good news, for, you see, I have not much longer to live. I am broken, very much broken.” He might detail to me his imaginary ills, analyze his stomach as much as he wished, his gout, his intestines, his heart, his head--I listened no more than a condemned man to whom his sentence has been announced listens to the words of his jailer. I saw only the fact so painful to me. You who have written some admirable pages upon jealousy, my dear master, and upon the ravages which the thought alone of the caress of a rival produces in the imagination of a lover, can divine what smarting poison this news poured into my wound. May, June, July, August, September--nearly five months since Charlotte had gone, and this wound instead of healing had become enlarged, poisoned until this last stroke which finished me. This time I did not have the cruel consolation that my suffering was shared. This marriage proved to me that she was cured of her sentiment for me, while I was agonized by mine for her. My fury was exasperated at the thought that this love had been snatched from me just at the moment I was about to be able to develop it in its fullness, at the very time of decisive action. I saw Charlotte in Paris, where M. de Plane was passing his leave of absence, receiving her _fiancé_ in the partial _tête-à-tête_ with a familiarity permitted under the indulgent eyes of the marquise. They were for this man now, these smiles at once proud and timid, these tender and anxious looks, these passages of paleness and modest red over her delicate face, these gestures of a grace always a little wild. Finally she loved him, since she was willing to marry him. And he seemed to me like Count André whose detestable influence I found even here, and whom I again hated in the _fiancé_ of his sister confounding these two gentlemen, these two elders, these two officers, in the same furious antipathy. Vain and puerile anger which I took with me into the wood already reclothed with those vague tints which would soon change to russet. The swallows were assembling for their departure. As the hunting season had begun there was firing all around them, and frightened, they rose in a flight such as that by which the wild bird had escaped which I had thought to bring down some day.