envy the
handsome, vigorous young fellow who was so happy at being alive, that
I had not the courage to check him, to show him the right road, and to
call out to him: 'Take care!' as children do at blind man's buff.

"And one day, after one of those interminable cotillons, where the
couples do not leave each other for hours, and can disappear together
without anybody thinking of noticing them, the poor fellow at last
discovered what love was, that real love which takes up its abode in the
very centre of the heart and in the brain, and is proud of being there,
and which rules like a sovereign and a tyrannous master, and he became
desperately enamored of a pretty but badly brought up girl, who was as
disquieting and wayward as she was pretty.

"She loved him, however, or rather she idolized him despotically,
madly, with all her enraptured soul and all her being. Left to do as she
pleased by imprudent and frivolous parents, suffering from neurosis, in
consequence of the unwholesome friendships which she contracted at the
convent school, instructed by what she saw and heard and knew was going
on around her, in spite of her deceitful and artificial conduct, knowing
that neither her father nor her mother, who were very proud of their
race as well as avaricious, would ever agree to let her marry the man
whom she had taken a liking to, that handsome fellow who had little
besides vision, ideas and debts, and who belonged to the middle-class,
she laid aside all scruples, thought of nothing but of becoming his, no
matter what might be the cost.

"By degrees, the unfortunate man's strength gave way, his heart
softened, and he allowed himself to be carried away by that current
which buffeted him, surrounded him, and left him on the shore like a
waif and a stray.

"They wrote letters full of madness to each other, and not a day passed
without their meeting, either accidentally, as it seemed, or at parties
and balls. She had yielded her lips to him in long, ardent caresses,
which had sealed their compact of mutual passion."

The doctor stopped, and his eyes suddenly filled with tears, as these
former troubles came back to his mind; and then, in a hoarse voice, he
went on, full of the horror of what he was going to relate:

"For months he scaled the garden wall, and, holding his breath and
listening for the slightest noise, like a burglar who is going to break
into a house, he went in by the servants' entrance, which she had left