to forget her death and think of her life?

"I soon saw that the poems were not what I had thought them to be.

"They game me a growing impression of being confused and much too
lengthy. The book so long adored was no better than what I had done
afterwards. I recalled, step by step, the background, the occasion,
the vanished gesture that had inspired these verses, and in spite of
their resurrection, I found them undeniably commonplace and
extravagant.

"An icy despair gripped me, as I bent my head over these remains of
song. Their sojourn in the tomb seemed to have deformed and crushed
the life out of my verses. They were as miserable as the wasted hand
from which I had taken them. They had been so sweet! 'Beautiful,
beautiful!' the happy little voice had cried so many times while she
clasped her hands in admiration.

"It was because her voice and the poems had been vibrating with life
and because the ardour and delirium of our love had adorned my rhymes
with all their charms, that they seemed so beautiful. But all that was
past, and in reality our love was no more.

"It was oblivion that I read at the same time as I read my book. Yes,
death had been contagious. My verses had remained there too long,
sleeping down below there in awful peace--in the sepulchre into which I
should never have dared to enter if love had still been alive. She was
indeed dead.

"I thought of what a useless and sacrilegious thing I had done and how
useless and sacrilegious everything is that we promise and swear to
here below.

"She was indeed dead. How I cried that night. It was my true night of
mourning. When you have just lost a beloved there is a wretched
moment, after the brutal shock, when you begin to understand that all
is over, and blank despair surrounds you and looms like a giant. That
night was a moment of such despair when I was under the sway of my
crime and the disenchantment of my poems, greater than the crime,
greater than everything.

"I saw her again. How pretty she was, with her bright, lively ways,
her animated charm, her rippling laugh, the endless number of questions
she was always asking. I saw her again in the sunlight on the bright
lawn. She was wearing a dress of old rose satin, and she bent over and
smoothed the soft folds of her skirt and looked at her little feet.
(Near us was the whiteness of a statue.) I remembered how once I had
for fun tried to find a single flaw in her complexion.