Returning to my former state of idleness, I felt more strongly what was lacking to my youth: I was a mystery to myself. I could not see a woman without feeling confused; I blushed if she spoke to me. My shyness, already excessive with people in general, became so great in the presence of a woman that I would have preferred any torture to that of being left alone with her: no sooner was she gone than I recalled her with all my wishes. The descriptions of Virgil, Tibullus and Massillon, it is true, presented themselves to my memory; but the image of my mother and sister covered all with its purity and made thicker the veils which nature sought to raise: my filial and brotherly affection deceived me with respect to an affection less disinterested. Had the loveliest slaves of the seraglio been handed over to me, I should not have known what to ask of them. Chance enlightened me. A neighbor of the Combourg domain came to spend a few days at the castle with his wife, a very pretty woman. Something, I know not what, happened in the village; we ran to one of the windows of the hall to look. I reached the window first, the fair visitor followed close upon my heels, I turned to give her my place. Involuntarily she obstructed my way, and I felt myself pressed between her and the window. I was no longer conscious of what was happening around me. [Sidenote: Vague longings.] From that moment I was aware that to love and be loved in a manner unknown to me must be the supreme happiness. Had I done what other men do, I should soon have become acquainted with the pains and pleasures of the passion whose germs I bore within me; but everything in me assumed an extraordinary character. The ardor of my imagination, my shyness, the solitude in which I lived caused me, rather than rush out of doors, to fall back upon myself; for want of a real object, I evoked, by the strength of my vague longings, a phantom which never left my side. I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another instance of this nature. * And so I built up a woman out of all the women whom I had seen: she had the figure, the hair, the smile of the stranger who had pressed me to her bosom; I gave her the eyes of one of the young girls of the Village, the complexion of another. The portraits of the fine ladies of the time of François I., Henry IV. and Louis XIV. which adorned the drawing-room supplied me with other features, and I even borrowed graces from the pictures of the Virgins that hung upon the church walls.