art-burning of seeing him
humble, kneeling at her feet, acting a comedy, trying every means of
overcoming her resistance, and to regain possession of that heart, which
was closed against him, after having been entirely his, in all its
adorable virginity.

And Marie-des-Anges had loved him so deeply that his letters in which he
recalled the past, and stirred up all the recollections of their love,
their kisses, and their dreams, softened her in spite of herself, and
came across her profound, incurable sadness, like a factitious light, the
reflection of a bonfire, which, from a distance, illuminates a prison
cell for a moment.

He was poor himself and had not wished, so he said, to drag her into his
life of privation and shifts, and she thought to herself that perhaps he
had been right; and thus sensibly, like a mother or an elder sister, who
has become indulgent and wishes to close her eyes and her ears against
everything, to forgive again, to forgive always, she excused him, and
tried to remember nothing but those months of tenderness and of ecstacy,
those months of happiness, and that he had been the first, the only man
who, in the course of her unhappy, wasted life, had given her a moment's
peace, had caused her to dream, and had made her happy, and youthful and
loving.

He had been charitable towards her and she would be so a hundred fold
towards him; and so she grew happy again, when she said to herself that
she would be his benefactress, that even with his hard heart, he could
not accept the sacrifice from a woman, who, like so many others, might
have returned him evil for evil, but who preferred to be kind and
maternal, after having been in love with him, without some feelings
of gratitude and emotion.

And that resolution transfigured her, restored to her temporarily,
something of her youth, which had so soon fled away, and a poor, heroic
saint amongst all the saints, she took refuge in a Carmelite convent, so
as to escape from this returning temptation, and to bequeath everything
of which she could lawfully dispose, to Monsieur de Gedre.

THE AWAKENING

During the three years that she had been married, she had not left the
_Val de Cire_, where her husband possessed two cotton-mills. She led a
quiet life, and although she had no children, she was quite happy in her
house among the trees, which the work-people called the _chateau_.

Although Monsieur Vasseur was considerably older than she was, he