How often our dialogue ran like that! The drama or the comedy changed, but our words were usually the same. I can still see her mechanical gesture. Before us, on the stage, a woman would torment and harass her husband with her sensual love; another, virtuous all her life to that time, surrender at last to an unknown blackguard; a third stole money to buy beautiful gowns in which to excite her husband’s waning desire for her; all, shedding an odour of the alcove upon the audience, represented to us as heroines of love; and upon that basis applauded frantically by the public, its nerves shaken. “They love; that is all,” was the general comment all about us. Raymonde shook her head, as if that were not all. One evening, aroused by the general acclamation, unable to resist that magnetic current which comes from an electrified crowd, I insisted on sustaining the popular theories regarding a play in which the heroine, a young girl, gave herself up in a burst of passion to her sister’s husband. “Love, true love, disregards morals, tramples upon suffering, takes no account of anything outside of itself. That has its beauty, don’t you think so?” “That is not loving,” she murmured. I continued my panegyric. “Love, true love, in its splendid violence, does not stop at a fault, or even a crime.” “That isn’t loving,” she repeated. “What then does love mean, according to your idea?” I demanded, surprised at her resistance. “According to my idea? Oh, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that.” “Yes, you must acquire the habit of being able to express what you feel, Raymonde. That is the whole art of conversation.” She hesitated: I saw her lips open and tremble a little. She shook her head, and then suddenly made up her mind: “Do you remember going into a little chapel one evening?” “Yes, with you.” “A dark chapel, lighted only by the altar lamp? It seems to me that one’s heart is like that.” “One’s heart?” “Yes, the heart is in darkness, unknown. But the lamp which shines in the sanctuary is our love. It is there, watching and praying. To love is to understand oneself more clearly, to take one’s impulses and thoughts out of the shadow. We do not take faults and crimes out of the shadow. And since love is light, it is also the desire to make ourselves better.” And then very low, as if to herself, she added: “As for myself, the more I love, the less I can do evil.” But when would she have done so? When had she not loved? She rarely expressed herself at so great length. The flame which watches and prays shone from her eyes all over her face; carried away by her subject her every feature reflected the light of which she had spoken. Had I been away from the theatre, the world, and its false conception of life, I might have adored her for her simple lesson of love, her ineffable avowal of tenderness. The air of the Sleeping Woods suddenly refreshed me. I drank from those springs of youth and felt their purifying virtue.