few
days I was able to beat Monsieur de Mortsauf; but no sooner had I
done so and won his money for the first time than his temper became
intolerable; his eyes glittered like those of tigers, his face
shrivelled, his brows knit as I never saw brows knit before or since.
His complainings were those of a fretful child. Sometimes he flung
down the dice, quivered with rage, bit the dice-box, and said insulting
things to me. Such violence, however, came to an end. When I had
acquired enough mastery of the game I played it to suit me; I so managed
that we were nearly equal up to the last moment; I allowed him to win
the first half and made matters even during the last half. The end of
the world would have surprised him less than the rapid superiority of
his pupil; but he never admitted it. The unvarying result of our games
was a topic of discourse on which he fastened.

"My poor head," he would say, "is fatigued; you manage to win the last
of the game because by that time I lose my skill."

The countess, who knew backgammon, understood my manoeuvres from the
first, and gave me those mute thanks which swell the heart of a young
man; she granted me the same look she gave to her children. From that
ever-blessed evening she always looked at me when she spoke. I cannot
explain to you the condition I was in when I left her. My soul had
annihilated my body; it weighed nothing; I did not walk, I flew. That
look I carried within me; it bathed me with light just as her last
words, "Adieu, monsieur," still sounded in my soul with the harmonies of
"O filii, o filioe" in the paschal choir. I was born into a new life,
I was something to her! I slept on purple and fine linen. Flames darted
before my closed eyelids, chasing each other in the darkness like
threads of fire in the ashes of burned paper. In my dreams her voice
became, though I cannot describe it, palpable, an atmosphere of light
and fragrance wrapping me, a melody enfolding my spirit. On the morrow
her greeting expressed the fulness of feelings that remained unuttered,
and from that moment I was initiated into the secrets of her voice.

That day was to be one of the most decisive of my life. After dinner we
walked on the heights across a barren plain where no herbage grew;
the ground was stony, arid, and without vegetable soil of any kind;
nevertheless a few scrub oaks and thorny bushes straggled there, and in
place of grass, a carpet of crimped mosses, illuminated by the set