it this noise that is going on about me? What did you love in me at the outset? Was it the splendor that encompassed me? If you hate me to-day, I must needs doubt your past love; I must needs see in you, instead of that angel, that devoted victim whose blood, shed for me, falls ceaselessly drop by drop upon my lips, only a poor, weak, credulous girl, who loved me from vanity and deserted me from selfishness. Juliette, Juliette, think of what you will do if you leave me! You will ruin the only friend who knows you, appreciates and respects you, for a society which despises you now and whose esteem you will never recover. You have nothing left but me in the whole world, my poor child. You must either cling to the adventurer's fortunes or die forgotten in a convent. If you leave me, you are no less insane than cruel; you will have had all your misery, all your sufferings, and you will not reap their fruit; for now, if, notwithstanding all that you know, you can still love me and stay with me, be sure that I will love you with a love of which you have no conception, and which I never should have dreamed of as possible if I had married you honestly and lived with you peacefully in the bosom of your family. Hitherto, despite all you have sacrificed, all you have suffered, I have not loved you as I feel that I am capable of loving. You have never yet loved me as I am; you have cherished an attachment for a false Leoni, in whom you still saw some grandeur and some fascination. You hoped that he would become some day the man you loved in the beginning; you did not believe that you had held in your arms a man who was irrevocably lost. And I said to myself: 'She loves me conditionally; it is not I whom she loves as yet, but the character I am acting. When she sees my features under my mask, she will cover her eyes and fly; she will look with horror on the lover whom now she presses to her bosom. No, she is not the wife and mistress I had dreamed of, and for whom my ardent heart is calling with all its strength. Juliette is still a part of that society whose foe I am; she will be my foe when she knows me. I cannot confide in her; I cannot pour out upon the bosom of any living being the most execrable of my sufferings, my shame for what I am doing every day. I suffer, I am heaping up remorse in my soul. If only there were a woman capable of loving me without asking me to change--if I could have a friend who would not be an accuser and a judge!'--That is what I thought, Juliette. I prayed to heaven for that friend, but I prayed that it might be you and no other; for you were already what I loved best on earth before. I realized all that there still remained for us both to do before loving each other really."