I had been sincere, and sincere without the shadow of calculation, in the resolution of suicide which caused me to buy the nux vomica, and then to write to Charlotte. When she had come, when she had fallen into my arms and cried: “Let us die together!” I responded: “Let us die together,” with the most perfect good faith. It had appeared so simple, so natural, so easy for us to go away together. You, who have written some strong pages upon the vapor of illusion created in us by physical causes, which is like that intoxication produced by wine, you will not judge me a monster for having felt this vapor dissipate, this intoxication disappear with possession. Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep, exhausted by the excess of her emotions. I looked at her and I felt, without knowing how, that I fell back from my state before this happiness, to the reflective, philosophic, and lucid one which had been mine, and which a sorcery had metamorphosed into another. I looked at Charlotte, and thought that in a few hours this adorable body, animated at this moment by all the ardors of life, would be immovable, cold, dead--dead this mouth which trembled still with my kiss, dead these beautiful eyes shaded under their trembling lids, dead this mind filled with me, intoxicated of me! I repeated mentally several times this word: “Dead, dead, dead,” and what it represents of a sudden falling into the night, of an irreparable fall into the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, oppressed my heart. This entrance into the gulf without bottom of annihilation which had seemed, not only easy, but profoundly desirable when the fury of unfortunate love dominated me--suddenly, and this fury once appeased, appeared to me the most formidable of actions, the most foolish, the most impossible of execution. Charlotte continued to keep her eyes closed. The emaciation of her poor face, rendered more perceptible by the way in which the softened light revealed her features, told too plainly what she had felt for days. And I was going to kill her, or at least, to assist her to destroy herself. We were about to kill ourselves. A shudder ran through me at the thought, and I was afraid. For her? For myself? For both? I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of which I had turn by turn desired and abjured. I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its horizons. My personal works, this brain of which I had been so proud, this Self cultivated so complaisantly, I was about to sacrifice all these treasures.