en, his eyes dark
and blue, dying, enchanted. And she had liked these marvels of a morning
more charming than a day. Dechartre was for her the soul of those
magnificent forms, the mind of those noble things. It was by him, it was
through him, that she understood art and life. She took no interest in
things that did not interest him. How had this affection come to her?
She had no precise remembrance of it. In the first place, when Paul
Vence wished to introduce him to her, she had no desire to know him,
no presentiment that he would please her. She recalled elegant bronze
statuettes, fine waxworks signed with his name, that she had remarked
at the Champ de Mars salon or at Durand-Ruel's. But she did not imagine
that he could be agreeable to her, or more seductive than many artists
and lovers of art at whom she laughed with her friends. When she saw
him, he pleased her; she had a desire to attract him, to see him often.
The night he dined at her house she realized that she had for him a
noble and elevating affection. But soon after he irritated her a little;
it made her impatient to see him closeted within himself and too little
preoccupied by her. She would have liked to disturb him. She was in that
state of impatience when she met him one evening, in front of the grille
of the Musee des Religions, and he talked to her of Ravenna and of the
Empress seated on a gold chair in her tomb. She had found him serious
and charming, his voice warm, his eyes soft in the shadow of the night,
but too much a stranger, too far from her, too unknown. She had felt
a sort of uneasiness, and she did not know, when she walked along the
boxwood bordering the terrace, whether she desired to see him every day
or never to see him again.

Since then, at Florence, her only pleasure was to feel that he was near
her, to hear him. He made life for her charming, diverse, animated, new.
He revealed to her delicate joys and a delightful sadness; he awakened
in her a voluptuousness which had been always dormant. Now she was
determined never to give him up. But how? She foresaw difficulties; her
lucid mind and her temperament presented them all to her. For a moment
she tried to deceive herself; she reflected that perhaps he, a dreamer,
exalted, lost in his studies of art, might remain assiduous without
being exacting. But she did not wish to reassure herself with that idea.
If Dechartre were not a lover, he lost all his charm. She did not dare
to think o