During this day and those which followed I had to bear a kind of torture I had foreseen, though without realizing how painful it would be. The marriage was fixed for a month later. All the preparations had to be made at once and in great haste. Regularly each morning came one of Mme. Provost’s bouquets. Laces, dresses, jewels poured in and were exhibited every evening to interested and envious ladies. I had to give my opinion and my advice on everything. Mlle. Marguerite begged for them with almost cruel persistence. I responded as graciously as I could, and then returned to my tower and took from a secret drawer the tattered handkerchief I had won at the risk of my life, and I dried my tears with it. Weakness again! But what would you have? I love her. Treachery, enmity, hopeless misunderstandings, her pride and mine, separate us forever! So let it be, but nothing can prevent me from living and dying with my heart full of her. As for M. de Bévallan, I did not hate him; he was not worthy of it. He is a vulgar but harmless soul. Thank God! I could receive the overtures of his shallow friendliness without hypocrisy, and put my hand tranquilly in his. But if he was too insignificant for my resentment, that did not lessen the deep and lacerating agony with which I recognised his unworthiness of the rare creature he would soon possess—and never know. I cannot, and I dare not, describe the flood of bitter thoughts, of nameless sensations which have been aroused in me at the thought of this odious _mésalliance_, and have not yet subsided. Love, real true love, has something sacred in it, which gives an almost superhuman character to its pain as to its joy. To the man who loves her, a woman has a sort of divinity of which no other man knows the secret, which belongs only to her lover, and to see even the threshold of this mystery profaned by another gives us a strange and indescribable shock—a horror, as of sacrilege. It is not merely that a precious possession is taken from you; it is an altar polluted, a mystery violated, a god defiled! This is jealousy. At least, it is mine. In all sincerity it seemed to me that in the whole world I only had eyes to see, intelligence to understand, and a heart to worship in its full perfection the beauty of this angel. With any other she would be cast away, and lost; body and soul, she was destined for me from all eternity. So vast was my pride! I expiated it with suffering as immeasurable.