I had stepped into the second circle of human life; I suffered.
And yet, in spite of this pain, a mysterious hymn, an unknown song, rose from the depths of my soul; that hymn extolled pain, and for the first time cried out to the child, "Courage! you are a man!"
The boon I craved above aught else was solitude.
The musicians were playing the first bars of a quadrille; everyone sprang up to take his partner's hand. Fourcade made an interrogative sign with his head, which signified "Will you be my vis-à-vis again?" I replied with a negative sign, and, as the two Parisian girls were going to take their places with two new dancers, I went away.
I could not possibly describe what passed through my mind during the hour I spent dreaming by myself. The whole of my childhood disappeared; just as towns and villages, valleys and mountains, lakes and rivers disappear in an earthquake: the present alone remained with me, an immense chaos, lit up by intermittent flashes which neither showed up the whole void nor its details: nothing seemed definite enough to get hold of, either with regard to my body or my mind. The only definite incontestably real actual thing was that during the last quarter of an hour I had fallen in love.
With whom?
With no one as yet ... but with Love.
I returned at the end of an hour.
"You are polite!" Vittoria said to me; "you asked me to waltz with you, and then you go away."
"Quite true," I replied: "I beg your pardon, I had forgotten."