A friend of the Pontiff offered me for residence a villa near Rome. How beautiful were the lemon and fig groves! In the garden's centre was a marble pillar surmounted by a nymph which had stood there since the Roman Empire. Amid the fragrance of those flowers were passed the dearest days of my youth. Marie, daughter of Bray and fiancée of Montmorin, a gentle girl, five years my senior--a trifle it seemed to me--accompanied me often with affectionate solicitude. Her white hands smoothed my golden curls, fastened my lace collar and rested on my shoulder, during our rambles. Montmorin, on seeing us together, would turn away and re-enter the house. My head, resting upon Marie's breast, seemed again to repose in the sweet nest from which the Revolution had torn me. Once when Marie flung a flower in my face, the image of my mother rose so vividly to my eyes, as she appeared when romping with us in the royal gardens, that my emotion overcame me and I threw myself into the arms of Montmorin's fiancée. I kissed her lips and asked: "Marie, what have they done to my mother?"--for since the terrible day when I was separated from her, I had never spoken her name, nor received intelligence of her fate. I pictured her still as a pale, worn prisoner and my duty seemed to be to deliver her. This sudden tempest of passion transformed me from boy to man. Marie wept softly in my arms. "My mother,--where is she?" I insisted. "She is dead," said Marie gently. "O my mother!" I cried out, falling senseless to the ground. On regaining consciousness, I saw Marie at my pillow. "O die with me," I said. "Let us be with my mother." When I was strong enough to leave my bed, I noticed that Marie, under numerous pretexts, absented herself from me. Our rambles ceased and she was often with Montmorin. This at first enraptured her lover but he soon discovered that she was preoccupied and sad, while I, jealous and melancholy, walked alone in the woods. I wandered near the margins of pestilential lakes, in the hope that, being overcome by malaria, Marie would again sit by my bed. Montmorin's generous heart divined the cause of my sadness and of Marie's enforced fidelity to him. He said: "Marie, our first duty is to make Augustus" (for so he called me) "happy. I shall go to France in his interests." And he left us. Consider Montmorin's action, Thérèse, and realize to what a generous and absurd height a loyal soul is raised by the principle symbolized in royalty. Montmorin renounced his plighted wife as later on he renounced his life in devotion to the PRINCIPLE. And Marie, beholding in me not a hapless castaway but the incarnation of the PRINCIPLE, erected like a second Lavallière an altar whereon she radiantly idealized me, after having vainly sought to idealize her betrothed.