commonplace enough; but one word will change it all: I love Honorine,
I have never ceased to worship her. From the day when she left me I
have lived on memory; one by one I recall the pleasures for which
Honorine no doubt had no taste.

"'Oh!' said he, seeing the amazement in my eyes, 'do not make a hero
of me, do not think me such a fool, as the Colonel of the Empire would
say, as to have sought no diversion. Alas, my boy! I was either too
young or too much in love; I have not in the whole world met with
another woman. After frightful struggles with myself, I tried to
forget; money in hand, I stood on the very threshold of infidelity,
but there the memory of Honorine rose before me like a white statue.
As I recalled the infinite delicacy of that exquisite skin, through
which the blood might be seen coursing and the nerves quivering; as I
saw in fancy that ingenuous face, as guileless on the eve of my
sorrows as on the day when I said to her, "Shall we marry?" as I
remembered a heavenly fragrance, the very odor of virtue, and the
light in her eyes, the prettiness of her movements, I fled like a man
preparing to violate a tomb, who sees emerging from it the
transfigured soul of the dead. At consultations, in Court, by night, I
dream so incessantly of Honorine that only by excessive strength of
mind do I succeed in attending to what I am doing and saying. This is
the secret of my labors.

"'Well, I felt no more anger with her than a father can feel on
seeing his beloved child in some danger it has imprudently rushed
into. I understood that I had made a poem of my wife--a poem I
delighted in with such intoxication, that I fancied she shared the
intoxication. Ah! Maurice, an indiscriminating passion in a husband is
a mistake that may lead to any crime in a wife. I had no doubt left