Blerot had been my most intimate friend from childhood; we had no
secrets from each other, and were united heart and soul by a brotherly
intimacy and a boundless confidence in each other, and I had been
intrusted with the secret of all his love affairs, as he had been with
mine.

When he told me that he was going to get married I was hurt, just as if
he had been guilty of a treacherous act with regard to me. I felt that
it must interfere with that cordial and absolute affection which had
united us hitherto. His wife would come between us. The intimacy of the
marriage-bed establishes a kind of complicity of mysterious alliance
between two persons, even when they have ceased to love each other. Man
and wife are like two discreet partners who will not let anyone else
into their secrets. But that close bond which the conjugal kiss fastens
is widely loosened on the day on which the woman takes a lover.

I remember Blerot's wedding as if it were but yesterday. I would not be
present at the signing of the marriage contract, as I have no particular
liking for such ceremonies, but I only went to the civil wedding and to
the church.

His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a tall, slight girl, with
pale hair, pale cheeks, pale hands, and eyes to match. She walked with a
slightly undulating motion, as if she were on board a ship, and seemed
to advance with a succession of long, graceful curtsies.

Blerot seemed very much in love with her. He looked at her constantly,
and I felt a shiver of an immoderate desire for her pass through my
frame.

I went to see him in a few days, and he said to me:

"You do not know how happy I am; I am madly in love with her; but then
she is ... she is ..." He did not finish his sentence, but he put the
tips of his fingers to his lips with a gesture which signified:

"Divine! delicious! perfect!" and a good deal more besides.

I asked, laughing, "What! all that?"

"Everything that you can imagine," was his answer.

He introduced me to her. She was very pleasant, on easy terms with me,
as was natural, and begged me to look upon their house as my own. I felt
that he, Blerot, did not belong to me any longer. Our intimacy was
altogether checked, and we hardly found a word to say to each other.

I soon took my leave, and shortly afterwards went to the East, and
returned by way of Russia, Germany, Sweden, and Holland, after an
absence of eighteen months from Paris.

The morning after my a