"Hélène, you have been pitiless to me; perhaps one day you will have to answer for my ruined life."
That same night I set forth for Paris, wishing to arrive there in midwinter and in the heart of the season, when I could benumb my griefs by the distractions of its exciting and dissipating life.
[MADAME LA MARQUISE DE PËNÂFIEL]
CHAPTER XI
PORTRAITS
A year after my arrival in Paris, the peaceful days that I had passed with Hélène at Serval seemed like a beautiful dream, so much in contrast with my new sensations that I hardly cared to recall it. From that time I was convinced that the pretended "pleasures of memory" are all falsehoods, for from the moment we begin to regret the past, memory is only a bitterness, and, by comparison, the present becomes distasteful.
The publicity of Hélène's refusal had deeply wounded both my love and my vanity. I was too proud to admit that I was unhappy, and so I succeeded in forgetting my imagined wrongs. I soon became transported with delight at finding myself so completely my own master, and in musing on the employment of my newly found liberty. Then I readily found a way to excuse myself for my ungrateful neglect of my father's memory. I told myself that it was in pious obedience to his counsels that I had brought to naught the mercenary projects of Hélène, for I still sometimes found a miserable consolation, or, rather, a base excuse, for my behaviour in devising new and unworthy motives for the conduct of that good girl, who had now left her native province to travel in Germany with her mother.
However, as formerly, in spite of my regret for the past, its remembrance soon became dim, and then was entirely obliterated from my mind.
It was most probably the excitement of the Parisian life which brought about this forgetfulness of those happy days which were so dear to my heart.
I had not come to Paris as an unsophisticated provincial. I had spent two brilliant seasons in London, and, thanks to the long and intimate relations of my uncle with our ambassador, an intimacy which my father and my aunt had reminded him of in introducing me to him when I was on my voyage, I had been presented to the best and most aristocratic society in England.