with the despairing knowledge that he
should not even gain a little pity from her, that she would always be
ignorant of his terrible torment, and that another would marry her!
At this thought constantly recurring, impossible to drive away, he was
seized with an animal-like desire to howl like chained dogs, for like
them he felt powerless, enslaved, imprisoned. Becoming more and more
nervous, the longer he thought, he walked with long strides through
the vast room, lighted up as if for a celebration. At last, unable to
tolerate longer the pain of that reopened wound, he wished to try to
calm it with the recollection of his early love, to drown it in evoking
his first and great passion. From the closet where he kept it he took
the copy of the Countess's portrait that he had made formerly for
himself, then he put it on his easel, and sitting down in front of it,
gazed at it. He tried to see her again, to find her living again, such
as he had loved her before. But it was always Annette that rose upon the
canvas. The mother had disappeared, vanished, leaving in her place that
other face which resembled hers so strangely. It was the little one,
with her hair a little lighter, her smile a little more mischievous, her
air a little more mocking; and he felt that he belonged body and soul
to that young being, as he never had belonged to the other, as a sinking
vessel belongs to the waves!

Then he arose, and in order to see this apparition no more he turned the
painting around; then, as he felt his heart full of sadness, he went
to his chamber to bring into the studio the drawer of his desk, wherein
were sleeping all the letters of the mistress of his heart. There they
lay, as if in a bed, one upon the other, forming a thick layer of little
thin papers. He thrust his hands among the mass, among all that which
spoke of both of them, deep into that bath of their long intimacy. He
looked at that narrow board coffin in which lay the mass of piled-up
envelopes, on which his name, his name alone, was always written. He
reflected that the love, the tender attachment of two beings, one for
the other, were recounted therein, among that yellowish wave of papers
spotted by red seals, and he inhaled, in bending over it, the old
melancholy odor of letters that have been packed away.

He wished to re-read them, and feeling in the bottom of the drawer, he
drew out a handful of the earlier ones. As soon as he opened them vivid
memories emerged