p my love within my
soul and never to abuse our friendship by leading this woman step by
step to love. All noble feelings were awakened within me, and I heard
the murmur of their voices. Before confining myself within the narrow
walls of a room, I stopped beneath the azure heavens sown with stars,
I listened to the ring-dove plaints of my own heart, I heard again the
simple tones of that ingenuous confidence, I gathered in the air the
emanations of that soul which henceforth must ever seek me. How grand
that woman seemed to me, with her absolute forgetfulness of self, her
religion of mercy to wounded hearts, feeble or suffering, her declared
allegiance to her legal yoke. She was there, serene upon her pyre of
saint and martyr. I adored her face as it shone to me in the darkness.
Suddenly I fancied I perceived a meaning in her words, a mysterious
significance which made her to my eyes sublime. Perhaps she longed that
I should be to her what she was to the little world around her. Perhaps
she sought to draw from me her strength and consolation, putting me thus
within her sphere, her equal, or perhaps above her. The stars, say
some bold builders of the universe, communicate to each other light and
motion. This thought lifted me to ethereal regions. I entered once more
the heaven of my former visions; I found a meaning for the miseries of
my childhood in the illimitable happiness to which they had led me.

Spirits quenched by tears, hearts misunderstood, saintly Clarissa
Harlowes forgotten or ignored, children neglected, exiles innocent of
wrong, all ye who enter life through barren ways, on whom men's faces
everywhere look coldly, to whom ears close and hearts are shut, cease
your complaints! You alone can know the infinitude of joy held in that
moment when one heart opens to you, one ear listens, one look answers
yours. A single day effaces all past evil. Sorrow, despondency, despair,
and melancholy, passed but not forgotten, are links by which the soul
then fastens to its mate. Woman falls heir to all our past, our sighs,
our lost illusions, and gives them back to us ennobled; she explains
those former griefs as payment claimed by destiny for joys eternal,
which she brings to us on the day our souls are wedded. The angels alone
can utter the new name by which that sacred love is called, and none but
women, dear martyrs, truly know what Madame de Mortsauf now became to
me--to me, poor and desolate.

CHAPTER II. FIR