in common hearts can absence lessen love or efface the
features or diminish the beauty of our dear one. To ardent imaginations,
to all beings through whose veins enthusiasm passes like a crimson tide,
and in whom passion takes the form of constancy, absence has the same
effect as the sufferings of the early Christians, which strengthened
their faith and made God visible to them. In hearts that abound in love
are there not incessant longings for a desired object, to which the
glowing fire of our dreams gives higher value and a deeper tint? Are
we not conscious of instigations which give to the beloved features the
beauty of the ideal by inspiring them with thought? The past, dwelt on
in all its details becomes magnified; the future teems with hope. When
two hearts filled with these electric clouds meet each other, their
interview is like the welcome storm which revives the earth and
stimulates it with the swift lightnings of the thunderbolt. How many
tender pleasures came to me when I found these thoughts and these
sensations reciprocal! With what glad eyes I followed the development
of happiness in Henriette! A woman who renews her life from that of her
beloved gives, perhaps, a greater proof of feeling than she who dies
killed by a doubt, withered on her stock for want of sap; I know not
which of the two is the more touching.

The revival of Madame de Mortsauf was wholly natural, like the effects
of the month of May upon the meadows, or those of the sun and of the
brook upon the drooping flowers. Henriette, like our dear valley of
love, had had her winter; she revived like the valley in the springtime.
Before dinner we went down to the beloved terrace. There, with one hand
stroking the head of her son, who walked feebly beside her, silent, as
though he were breeding an illness, she told me of her nights beside his
pillow.

For three months, she said, she had lived wholly within herself,
inhabiting, as it were, a dark palace; afraid to enter sumptuous rooms
where the light shone, where festivals were given, to her denied, at the
door of which she stood, one glance turned upon her child, another to
a dim and distant figure; one ear listening for moans, another for a
voice. She told me poems, born of solitude, such as no poet ever
sang; but all ingenuously, without one vestige of love, one trace of
voluptuous thought, one echo of a poesy orientally soothing as the rose
of Frangistan. When the count joined us she continue