ned, more active, larger, and more free
than she had ever felt it.

She recalled a thousand forgotten things, little details of her
childhood, trifles which had given her pleasure. Endowed suddenly
with an awakened agility, her mind leaped to the most diverse ideas,
ran through a thousand adventures, wandered in the past, and lost
itself in the hoped-for events of the future. And her lively and
careless thoughts had a sensuous charm: she experienced a divine
pleasure in dreaming thus.

She still heard the voices, but she could no longer distinguish the
words, which to her seemed to have a different meaning. She was in a
kind of strange and changing fairyland.

She was on a great boat which floated through a beautiful country,
all covered with flowers. She saw people on the shore, and these
people spoke very loudly; then she was again on land, without asking
how, and Servigny, clad as a prince, came to seek her, to take her
to a bull-fight.

The streets were filled with passers-by, who were talking, and she
heard conversations which did not astonish her, as if she had known
the people, for through her dreamy intoxication, she still heard her
mother's friends laughing and talking on the terrace.

Then everything became vague. Then she awakened, deliciously
benumbed, and she could hardly remember what had happened.

So, she was not yet dead. But she felt so calm, in such a state of
physical comfort, that she was not in haste to finish with it--she
wanted to make this exquisite drowsiness last forever.

She breathed slowly and looked at the moon, opposite her, above the
trees. Something had changed in her spirit. She no longer thought as
she had done just now. The chloroform quieting her body and her soul
had calmed her grief and lulled her desire to die.

Why should she not live? Why should she not be loved? Why should she
not lead a happy life? Everything appeared possible to her now, and
easy and certain. Everything in life was sweet, everything was
charming. But as she wished to dream on still, she poured more of
the dream-water on the cotton and began to breathe it in again,
stopping at times, so as not to absorb too much of it and die.

She looked at the moon and saw in it a face, a woman's face. She
began to scorn the country in the fanciful intoxication of the drug.
That face swung in the sky; then it sang, it sang with a well-known
voice the alleluia of love.

It was the Marquise, who had come in and s