I meet Catherine at Khios. After several days of intercourse, I attempt a declaration, which she severely repulses; then I surround her with the most respectful attentions, I give her counsels the most delicate and disinterested. If I do not utter the word love, everything in my tender and eager attentions reveals this sentiment.
She remains cold, and offers me her friendship.
I again meet Catherine in Paris. In spite of my blind submission to Irene's painful whims, in spite of the numberless proofs of the deepest and most noble passion, one day, without cause, without hesitation, under the most frivolous pretext, Catherine cruelly breaks with me.
Later, it is true, she tells me that jealousy alone was responsible for her conduct.
She said that; but I remember the harshness of her accent, her steely glance, which struck me to the heart.
She was doubtless feigning; she can, therefore, dissimulate; she is false. I did not believe it.
The mysterious affection of which Irene was the bond is now broken. Catherine loves me no more! She shows herself even ungrateful, as a friend. I see her no more.
In despair, I seek distraction in work. I accept a position of apparent importance with the minister; public opinion attributes to me an exaggerated share in state affairs. From this time, Madame de Fersen, until now so inflexible towards me, by degrees becomes less cold when she meets me in society; her looks, the tone of her voice, do not harmonise with the conventional trifling of her conversation; and, at last, at a ball at the château, she comes resolutely towards me, with the view of renewing our interrupted relations. I meet coldly these advances, and the next morning she writes to me.
This she has confessed to me. This sudden change in her affections she attributes to her joy at my breaking with Madame de V—— and to the alarming condition in which her child had once more fallen.
I wish to believe her, for it would be odious to think that the abrupt change from disdain to tenderness should have been brought about by the hope of securing to herself a tool in the very heart of the French cabinet.