"Peace," interrupted Gerfaut; "I have not finished. Smoke and listen.

"I followed Madame de Bergenheim as far as Geneva. She had gone there
from here with her aunt, and had availed herself of this journey to visit
Mont Blanc. She left for her home the next day without my meeting her
again; but I preserved her name, and it was not unknown to me. I had
heard it spoken in several houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and I
knew that I should certainly have an opportunity of meeting her during
the winter.

"So I remained at Geneva, yielding to a sensation as new as it was
strange. It first acted upon my brain whose ice I felt melting away,
and its sources ready to gush forth. I seized my pen with a passion not
unlike an access of rage. I finished in four days two acts of a drama
that I was then writing. I never had written anything more vigorous or
more highly colored. My unconstrained genius throbbed in my arteries,
ran through my blood, and bubbled over as if it wished to burst forth.
My hand could not keep even with the course of my imagination; I was
obliged to write in hieroglyphics.

"Adieu to the empty reveries brought about by spleen, and to the
meditations 'a la Werther'! The sky was blue, the air pure, life
delightful--my talent was not dead.

"After this first effort, I slackened a little! Madame de Bergenheim's
face, which I had seen but dimly during this short time, returned to me
in a less vaporous form; I took extreme delight in calling to mind the
slightest circumstances of our meeting, the smallest details of her
features, her toilette, her manner of walking and carrying her head.
What had impressed me most was the extreme softness of her dark eyes,