statuettes, fine waxworks signed with his name, that she had remarked at
the Champ de Mars salon or at Durand-Ruel's. But she did not imagine
that he could be agreeable to her, or more seductive than many artists
and lovers of art at whom she laughed with her friends. When she saw
him, he pleased her; she had a desire to attract him, to see him often.
The night he dined at her house she realized that she had for him a noble
and elevating affection. But soon after he irritated her a little;
it made her impatient to see him closeted within himself and too little
preoccupied by her. She would have liked to disturb him. She was in
that state of impatience when she met him one evening, in front of the
grille of the Musee des Religions, and he talked to her of Ravenna and
of the Empress seated on a gold chair in her tomb. She had found him
serious and charming, his voice warm, his eyes soft in the shadow of the
night, but too much a stranger, too far from her, too unknown. She had
felt a sort of uneasiness, and she did not know, when she walked along
the boxwood bordering the terrace, whether she desired to see him every
day or never to see him again.

Since then, at Florence, her only pleasure was to feel that he was near
her, to hear him. He made life for her charming, diverse, animated, new.
He revealed to her delicate joys and a delightful sadness; he awakened
in her a voluptuousness which had been always dormant. Now she was
determined never to give him up. But how? She foresaw difficulties;
her lucid mind and her temperament presented them all to her. For a
moment she tried to deceive herself; she reflected that perhaps he,
a dreamer, exalted, lost in his studies of art, might remain assiduous
without being exacting. But she did not wish to reassure herself with
that idea. If Dechartre were not a lover, he lost all his charm. She
did not dare to think of the future. She lived in the present, happy,
anxious, and closing her eyes.