"No, no, I shall never love him!
"I am horrified at myself. What! in presence of Raphael's murderer I have not felt either hatred or fury! Oh, shame, shame upon me! he saw my weakness.
"Alas! what am I to do? When I hear his voice, when his ardent look is fixed upon me, my firmest resolutions forsake me,—I only think of listening to him, of looking at him.
"He is so handsome, with that manly and bold beauty, which the first time I saw him made upon me so deep, so lasting an impression! Every thing in him bespeaks one of those men so passionately energetic, who love as I would be loved, as I never have been loved. Oh! if my will and his were united, at what a pitch of happiness might we not arrive!
"Blessed be this book! I can say to it what I dare not reveal to any human creature,—what I dare not even utter aloud.
"He has begged to introduce his wife to me. I hate her by anticipation,—and yet it is to her that I shall be indebted one day for receiving her husband. But this obligation irritates me against her,—it is her happiness I envy. She bears the name of the man who exercises such irresistible influence over me,—a name which I cannot now hear without being troubled. Oh, that woman! I hate her, I hate her—she is too happy!
"After all, why blush at my love? It will never be guilty—for it will never be happy!
"My heart's ambition is too great. He shall never know what he might have been to me had we both been free. Oh! what a dream! what paradise!
"The passion I experience is too powerful, too vast, to descend even to the falsehoods to which we should both be reduced, if we sought the pleasures of a vulgar love. No, no, to belong to him in the open gaze of day, in the face of the world, to bear his name nobly and proudly—or bury my unhappy love in the depths of my heart. No human power can make me surrender one of these two alternatives.
"But as he and I wear the chains of marriage,—those heavy, dragging chains! but as chance, in liberating the one would not liberate the other, my life will be but one long regret, one long punishment. What I say to you is true,—I have no interest in lying to myself. I know well enough my own firmness of character to be sure of my resolution.