contain my happiness. I needed the whole of nature to unbosom
myself.

I went out. Passing by the Rue d'Antin, I saw Marguerite's coupe'
waiting for her at the door. I went toward the Champs-Elysees. I
loved all the people whom I met. Love gives one a kind of
goodness.

After I had been walking for an hour from the Marly horses to the
Rond-Point, I saw Marguerite's carriage in the distance; I
divined rather than recognised it. As it was turning the corner
of the Champs-Elysees it stopped, and a tall young man left a
group of people with whom he was talking and came up to her. They
talked for a few moments; the young man returned to his friends,
the horses set out again, and as I came near the group I
recognised the one who had spoken to Marguerite as the Comte de
G., whose portrait I had seen and whom Prudence had indicated to
me as the man to whom Marguerite owed her position. It was to him
that she had closed her doors the night before; I imagined that
she had stopped her carriage in order to explain to him why she
had done so, and I hoped that at the same time she had found some
new pretext for not receiving him on the following night.

How I spent the rest of the day I do not know; I walked, smoked,
talked, but what I said, whom I met, I had utterly forgotten by
ten o'clock in the evening.

All I remember is that when I returned home, I spent three hours
over my toilet, and I looked at my watch and my clock a hundred
times, which unfortunately both pointed to the same hour.