I went out again, and thought no more of the book until at night,
when I was going to bed.

Manon Lescaut is a touching story. I know every detail of it, and
yet whenever I come across the volume the same sympathy always
draws me to it; I open it, and for the hundredth time I live over
again with the heroine of the Abbe Prevost. Now this heroine is
so true to life that I feel as if I had known her; and thus the
sort of comparison between her and Marguerite gave me an unusual
inclination to read it, and my indulgence passed into pity,
almost into a kind of love for the poor girl to whom I owed the
volume. Manon died in the desert, it is true, but in the arms of
the man who loved her with the whole energy of his soul; who,
when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with his
tears, and buried his heart in it; while Marguerite, a sinner
like Manon, and perhaps converted like her, had died in a
sumptuous bed (it seemed, after what I had seen, the bed of her
past), but in that desert of the heart, a more barren, a vaster,
a more pitiless desert than that in which Manon had found her
last resting-place.

Marguerite, in fact, as I had found from some friends who knew of
the last circumstances of her life, had not a single real friend
by her bedside during the two months of her long and painful
agony.

Then from Manon and Marguerite my mind wandered to those whom I
knew, and whom I saw singing along the way which led to just such
another death. Poor souls! if it is not right to love them, is it