murderer, however good a husband and father he might be. A curious
fatality impelled me to visit those houses where I knew I could meet
Victorine; often, after giving myself my word of honor to renounce the
happiness of seeing her, I found myself that same evening beside her.
My struggles were great. Legitimate love, full of chimerical remorse,
assumed the color of a criminal passion. I despised myself for bowing
to Taillefer when, by chance, he accompanied his daughter, but I bowed
to him all the same.

Alas! for my misfortune Victorine is not only a pretty girl, she is
also educated, intelligent, full of talent and of charm, without the
slightest pedantry or the faintest tinge of assumption. She converses
with reserve, and her nature has a melancholy grace which no one can
resist. She loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a
certain smile which she keeps for me alone; for me, her voice grows
softer still. Oh, yes! she loves me! But she adores her father; she
tells me of his kindness, his gentleness, his excellent qualities.
Those praises are so many dagger-thrusts with which she stabs me to
the heart.

One day I came near making myself the accomplice, as it were, of the
crime which led to the opulence of the Taillefer family. I was on the
point of asking the father for Victorine's hand. But I fled; I
travelled; I went to Germany, to Andernach; and then--I returned! I
found Victorine pale, and thinner; if I had seen her well in health
and gay, I should certainly have been saved. Instead of which my love
burst out again with untold violence. Fearing that my scruples might
degenerate into monomania, I resolved to convoke a sanhedrim of sound
consciences, and obtain from them some light on this problem of high
morality and philosophy,--a problem which had been, as we shall see,