left him--_Stella montis_, the inspiration of his childish love;
Estelle, now old, a grandmother, withered by age and grief. He made a
pilgrimage to Meylan, near Grenoble, to see her. He was then sixty-one
years old and she was nearly seventy. "The past! the past! O Time!
Nevermore! Nevermore!"[47]

Nevertheless, he loved her, and loved her desperately. How pathetic it
is. One has little inclination to smile when one sees the depths of that
desolate heart. Do you think he did not see, as clearly as you or I
would see, the wrinkled old face, the indifference of age, the "_triste
raison_," in her he idealised? Remember, he was the most ironical of
men. But he did not wish to see these things, he wished to cling to a
little love, which would help him to live in the wilderness of life.

"There is nothing real in this world but that which lives in the
heart.... My life has been wrapped up in the obscure little village
where she lives.... Life is only endurable when I tell myself:
'This autumn I shall spend a month beside her.' I should die in
this hell of a Paris if she did not allow me to write to her, and
if from time to time I had not letters from her."

So he spoke to Legouvé; and he sat down on a stone in a Paris street,
and wept. In the meantime, the old lady did not understand this
foolishness; she hardly tolerated it, and sought to undeceive him.

[Footnote 47: _Mémoires_, II, 396.]

"When one's hair is white one must leave dreams--even those of
friendship.... Of what use is it to form ties which, though they
hold to-day, may break to-morrow?"