th, absolute happiness,
my dream of dreams.

She never spoke to me about it, however, but seemed to recoil from a
definite explanation, which might make shipwreck of her love. She
surrounded me with endearing attentions, and appeared to be trying to
make my life so pleasant to me, that nothing in the world could draw me
from it! And she would certainly cure me, if this madness of mine, were
not, alas! like those wounds which are constantly reopening, and which
no balm can heal.

But, at times, I lived again, I imagined that her caresses had exorcised
me, that I was saved, that doubt was no longer gnawing at my heart, that
I was going to adore her again, like I used to adore her. I used to
throw myself at her knees and put my lips on her little hands which she
abandoned to me, I looked at her lovely, limpid eyes as if they had been
a piece of a blue sky that appeared amidst black storm clouds, and I
whispered, with something like a sob in my throat:

"You love me, do you not, with all your heart; you love me as much as I
love you; tell me so again, my dear love; tell me that, and nothing but
that!"

And she used to reply eagerly, with a smile of joy on her lips:

"Do you not know it? Do you not see every moment that I love you, that
you have taken entire possession of me, and that I only live for you and
by you?"

And her kisses gave me new life, and intoxicated me, like when one
returns from a long journey and had been in peril and is despaired of
ever seeing some beloved object again, and one meets with a sort of
frenzied embrace, and forgets everything in that divine feeling that one
is going to die of happiness....

PART X

But these were only ephemeral clear spots in our sky, and the cries
which accompanied them only grew more bitter and terrible. I knew that
Elaine was growing more and more uneasy at the apparent strangeness of
my character, that she suffered from it and that it affected her nerves,
that the existence to which I was condemning her in spite of myself,
that all this immoderate love of mine, followed by fits of inexplicable
coldness and of low spirits, disconcerted her, so that she was no longer
the same, and kept away from me. She could not hide her grief, and was
continually worrying me with questions of affectionate pity. She
repeated the same things over and over again, with hateful persistence.
She had vexed me, without knowing it! Was I already tired of my married
life, and did I re