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 specter? 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 distrustful, but on the contrary, bold and frank, suspecting nothing. I had to see my mistress betray me before my eyes before I would believe that she could deceive me. Desgenais himself, while preaching to me after his manner, joked me about the ease with which I could be duped. The story of my life was an incontestable proof that I was credulous rather than suspicious; and when the words in that book suddenly struck me, it seemed to me I felt a new being within me, a sort of unknown self; my reason revolted against the feeling, and I did not dare ask whither all that was leading me.
But the suffering I had endured, the memory of the perfidy that I had witnessed, the frightful cure I had imposed on myself, the opinions of my friends, the corrupt life I had led, the sad truths I had learned, all those that I had unconsciously surmised during my sad experience, finally, debauchery, contempt of love, abuse of everything, that is what I had in my heart although I did not suspect it; and at the moment when life and hope were again being born within me, all these furies that were growing numb with time, seized me by the throat and cried out that they were there.
I bent over and opened the book, then immediately closed it and threw it on the table. Brigitte was looking at me; in her beautiful eyes there was neither wounded pride nor anger; there was nothing but tender solicitude as if I were ill.
"Do you think I have secrets?" she asked, embracing me.
"No," I replied, "I know nothing except that you are beautiful and that I would die, loving you."
When I returned home to dinner I said to Larive:
"Who is that Madame Pierson?"
He looked at me in astonishment.