ing more in her than that.
She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget,
things, that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power;
it was only intensity of feeling--nervous feeling. I don't know ...
perhaps.... She has lived her life ... yes, within certain limits she has
lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first
time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry--a changeable little sprite. I
thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her
hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time
passes! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels!
Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no
intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once
... once I did, _enfin_! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder
what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever;
that I know.... I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments
when.... Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle,
subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her
charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she
hated her husband,--one never knew her,--I never knew how she would receive
me. The last time I saw her ... that stupid American would take her
downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the
pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could
not blame me that time--and all the stories she used to invent of my
indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the
excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a
certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to think of it night
and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de
Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the
flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard
St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the
furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the
ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois
sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt;--the mechanical admiration
for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere, the _Figaro_,
that is to say Albert Wolf, _l'homme le plus s