with emotion, he felt his old love springing
to life once more, like an awakened wild beast ready to bite him.

The young girl went on chattering, and every now and then some
familiar phrase of her mother which she had borrowed, a certain style
of speaking and thinking, that resemblance of mind and manner which
people acquire by living together, shook Lormerin from head to foot.
All these things penetrated him, making the reopened wound of his
passion bleed anew.

He got away early, and took a turn along the boulevard. But the image
of this young girl pursued him, haunted him, quickened his heart,
inflamed his blood. Apart from the two women, he now saw only one, a
young one, the one of former days returned, and he loved her as he had
loved her in bygone years. He loved her with greater ardor, after an
interval of twenty-five years.

He went home to reflect on this strange and terrible thing, and to
think on what he should do.

But, as he was passing, with a wax candle in his hand, before the
glass, the large glass in which he had contemplated himself and
admired himself before he started, he saw reflected there an elderly,
gray-haired man; and suddenly he recollected what he had been in olden
days, in the days of little Lise. He saw himself charming and
handsome, as he had been when he was loved! Then, drawing the light
nearer, he looked at himself more closely, as one inspects a strange
thing with a magnifying glass, tracing the wrinkles, discovering those
frightful ravages, which he had not perceived till now.

And he sat down, crushed at the sight of himself, at the sight of his
lamentable image, murmuring:

"All over, Lormerin!"

LETTER FOUND ON A DROWNED MAN

You ask me, madame, whether I am laughing at you? You cannot believe
that a man has never been smitten with love. Well, no, I have never
loved, never!

What is the cause of this? I really cannot tell. Never have I been
under the influence of that sort of intoxication of the heart which we
call love! Never have I lived in that dream, in that exaltation, in
that state of madness into which the image of a woman casts us. I have
never been pursued, haunted, roused to fever-heat, lifted up to
Paradise by the thought of meeting, or by the possession of, a being
who had suddenly become for me more desirable than any good fortune,
more beautiful than any other creature, more important than the whole
world! I have never wept, I have never suffered