"What are you doing here, Desgenais?" I asked as if I really saw him.
He looked as he did that evening, when he leaned over my table and
unfolded to me his catechism of vice.

I kept my eyes on the book and I felt vaguely stirring in my memory some
forgotten words of the past. The spirit of doubt hanging over my head
had injected into my veins a drop of poison; the vapor mounted to my head
and I staggered like a drunken man. What secret was Brigitte concealing
from me? I knew very well that I had only to bend over and open the
book; but at what place? How could I recognize the leaf on which my eye
had chanced to fall?

My pride, moreover, would not permit me to take the book; was it indeed
pride? "O God!" I said to myself with a frightful sense of sadness,
"is the past a spectre? and can it come out of its tomb? Ah! wretch
that I am, can I never love?"

All my ideas of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity
which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my mind;
and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a parade
of them, now it seemed that they were real, or at least that they had
been.

I had known Madame Pierson four months, but I knew nothing of her past
life and had never questioned her about it. I had yielded to my love for
her with confidence and without reservation. I found a sort of pleasure
in taking her just as she was, for just what she seemed, while suspicion
and jealousy are so foreign to my nature that I was more surprised at
feeling them toward Brigitte than she was in discovering them in me.
Never in my first love nor in the affairs of daily life have I been