es that
grow fairer every time they rise before him, memories that hold up to
him the ideal of perfect bliss? Such recollections are like children who
die in the flower of childhood, before their parents have known anything
of them but their smiles.

So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a mood fraught
with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt that Mme. de Beauseant
was one of the conditions of his existence, and that death would be
preferable to life without her. He was still young enough to feel
the tyrannous fascination which fully-developed womanhood exerts over
immature and impassioned natures; and, consequently, he was to spend one
of those stormy nights when a young man's thoughts travel from happiness
to suicide and back again--nights in which youth rushes through a
lifetime of bliss and falls asleep from sheer exhaustion. Fateful
nights are they, and the worst misfortune that can happen is to awake a
philosopher afterwards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in love to
sleep; he rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of them were
satisfactory, and he burned them all.

The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of her garden
walls, but he waited till nightfall; he was afraid that she might
see him. The instinct that led him to act in this way arose out of so
obscure a mood of the soul, that none but a young man, or a man in like
case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries, matter
to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in its
matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful
hesitation, Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter, which
may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to lovers, a
performance which, like the drawings prepared with great secrecy by
children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found insufferable by
every mortal except the recipients:--

"MADAME,--Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. Do not throw this
letter into the fire; be so kind as to read it through. Perhaps
you may pardon the opening sentence when you see that it is no
commonplace, selfish declaration, but that it expresses a simple
fact. Perhaps you may feel moved, because I ask for so little, by
the submission of one who feels himself so much beneath you, by
the influence that your decision will exercise upon my life. At my
age,