“I observed that until her last breath, Mme. de Beaumont did not doubt the truth of my attachment to her; she did not cease to show her surprise at it, and she seemed to die both disconsolate and overjoyed. She had believed that she was a burden to me, and she had wished to go away in order to rid me of her.” With what sadness these sentences were later to come back to us! I turned to Raymonde to note the effect upon her of such magnanimity. “How is it possible,” she said, “to write things like that if one is really in love. And if one is not in love, what an abominable farce!” All her simplicity and frankness was opposed to the sentimental buffoonery which is so widespread in our society, and from which she herself was shortly to suffer in her inability to accommodate herself to it. * * * When my thoughts are turned toward Rome by these moving memories, whose sweetness--which happily I did not succeed in utterly spoiling--I can better appreciate at a distance, I recall particularly two or three pilgrimages that drew me closer to her. In my thoughts I return alone to places where we had been together. We were standing at the edge of the first of the basins that occupy to-day the site of the palace of the Vestals. It was in the beginning of Spring, and some newly blown red roses were reflected in the water. Behind her stood the three remaining columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux, their marble shining with the caress of the sun. Around her there was nothing but ancient debris, mutilated statues, and these flowers. As at the end of autumn in the Sleeping Woods, she stood quite congruously in this past of more than two thousand years ago. Again, we were at the Coliseum, the arena already plunged into shadow, while the upper part of the huge wall, completely covered with gillyflowers, was still lighted by the rays of the setting sun. A guide had shown us the door through which they carried the dead bodies of the Christians that had been sacrificed to the wild beasts. Long shudders shook her whole body, and suddenly two tears, which she tried too long to keep back, fell from her eyes. “Why do you weep?” I asked. “It was here,” she murmured.