n
reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though
separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of
the house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from
the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had
sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the
slippery banks. They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves,
over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy
afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He
read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh
wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the
nasturtiums of the arbor. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life,
the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness
when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with
both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself
for not having loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took
possession of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his
arms and say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand
at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by
regret, became only the more acute.

Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt
there more brightly than the fire travelers leave on the snow of a
Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she
stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that
could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most
immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined,
her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness
that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost
hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete,--she gathered it all up, took
everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.

The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted
itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by
little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this
incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and
faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her
repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the
burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as