oubtless because you do not wish to tell me the reason that you refuse
to see me. I know that you are still at Pont de l'Arche, and that you
have never left Madame Taverneau's house. So that when she tells me in a
measured and mysterious tone that you have been absent for some time;
looking at the closed door of your room, behind which I divine your
presence, I am seized with an insane desire to kick down the narrow
plank which separates me from you. Fits of gloomy passion possess me
which illogical obstacles and unjust resistance always excite.

What have I done? What can you have against me? Let me at least know the
crime for which I am punished. On the scaffold they always read the
victim his sentence, equitable or otherwise. Will you be more cruel than
a hangman? Read me my sentence. Nothing is more frightful than to be
executed in a dungeon without knowing for what offence.

For three days--three eternities--I have taxed my memory to an alarming
extent. I have recalled everything that I have said for the last two
weeks, word by word, syllable for syllable, endeavoring to give to each
expression its intonation, its inflection, its sharps and flats. Every
different signification that the music of the voice could give to a
thought, I have analyzed, debated, commented upon twenty times a day.
Not a word, accent nor gesture has enlightened me. I defy the most
embittered and envious spirit to find anything that could offend the
most susceptible pride, the haughtiest majesty. Nothing has occurred in
my familiar intercourse with you that would alarm a sensitive plant or
a mimosa. Therefore, such cannot be the motive for your panic-stricken
flight. I am young, ardent, impetuous; I attach no importance to certain
social conventionalities, but I feel confident that I have never failed
in a religious respect for the holiness of love and modesty. I love
you--I could never, wilfully, have offended you. How could my eyes and
lips have expressed what was neither in my head nor in my heart? If
there is no fire without smoke, as a natural consequence there can be no
smoke without fire!

It is not that--Is it caprice or coquetry? Your mind is too serious and
your soul too honest for such an act; and besides, what would be your
object? Such feline cruelties may suit blase women of the world who are
roused by the sight of moral torture; who give, in the invisible sphere
of the passions, feasts of the Roman empresses, where beating hea