With a modesty to which I mutely paid homage, Jeannine avoided all allusions to the new state of affairs which had actually risen between us. But I read her passionate infatuation between the lines, in the burning contents of these letters. Scraps of them still float in my memory. She spoke of herself and of me, of my people and her people--our people. She touched lightly upon every subject, which at that time affected us like so many millions of our brothers. Did she not recall as if by chance various of those high problems which had formed the subject of our smiling discussions at Ballaigues--self-sacrifice, abnegation, disinterested attachment to such and such an idea or being? Did I deign now to bow before this sublime foolishness, she wondered? She did not insist upon it. She knew that she had easily carried her point. I developed our motives of inspiration, and returned them to her. They were all secretly contained--and she felt it, the sweet creature--in this one, we loved each other. Love! I dared to look this prodigious word in the face. The vision of promised joy kept me up. When once the war was over, the country saved,--in her eyes and in mine, everything else must give way to that--I pictured our reunion, our brief betrothal, and the day, oh God, the day when we should kneel side by side--What could it matter whatever separated me from that time? Toil and suffering, the spilling of my blood, what was it all? A moderate advance when such wondrous radiance filled the horizon. I had not given up my habit of analysis. An attitude of mind which stays with one, I believe, till death, when once adopted. I sometimes wondered at my youthful enthusiasm. Was I a captive? Caught up in the whirlwind? I who had thought myself safely in shelter. I asked myself whether this ardour were not partially fictitious or at all events ephemeral? How unlike me it was--I, who was so much imbued with the idea of my cold-bloodedness and stoicism--to become infatuated about this child, and that too when I was no longer in her presence, when I had been able to live beside her for weeks without being in the least perturbed or inflamed. Such reflections drew me as the bushes on the river-bank draw an abandoned boat drifting with the current. It was only a brief fluctuation. I gave one or two powerful strokes with the oars, and regained the open river, where the rapid stream carried me away.