"Au revoir."
And, with a light step, she crossed the threshold.
I went back to my room. I opened the window, and leaned out to watch her in the street.
She hurried along, with her light step, on the sunny side of the street, straight on, without turning her head to the right or left. The St. Martin summer shed a delicate gilding over the crystal of the sky; a calm warmth softened the air and conjured up the perfume of the absent violets. An immense sadness weighed on me, crashed me down on the window-sill; gradually it became intolerable.
Rarely in my life have I suffered so much as from that doubt which crumbled at one stroke my faith in Juliana, a faith that had lasted for so many years. Rarely had the flight of an illusion drawn from my soul such cries of anguish. But was it true that the illusion had fled and that the evil was irremediable? I could not, I would not, be persuaded of it.
That great illusion had been the companion of my whole misguided life. It answered not only to the exigencies of my egotism, but also to my æsthetic dream of moral greatness.
"Since moral greatness results from the violence of pains which one triumphs over, it is necessary, so that she may have an opportunity to be heroic, that she should suffer all I have made her suffer." This axiom, which had often succeeded in calming my remorse, was deeply rooted in my mind, and had caused to surge there from the best part of myself an ideal phantom to which I had vowed a sort of platonic cult. Debauched, culpable, tired, I took pleasure in recognizing in the ray of my own existence a soul severe, upright, and strong, an incorruptible soul, and it pleased me to be the object of its love, of an eternal love. All my vice, all my misery, all my feebleness, found a support in this illusion. I believed that for me there was a possible realization of the dream of all intellectual men: to be constantly unfaithful to a constantly faithful woman.
"What are you seeking? All the intoxication of life? Very well! go, run on, intoxicate yourself. In your house a dumb creature remembers and waits, like a veiled image in a sanctuary. The lamp in which you do not put a single drop more of oil burns without ever becoming extinguished. Is not that the dream of all intellectual men?"
And again: "No matter at what hour, no matter after what adventure, you will find her there on your return. She was awaiting your return with confidence, but she will not tell you of her waiting. You will rest your head on her knees and she will caress your temples with her finger-tips, to take away your pain."
I had a presentiment that one day I would return thus; I would end by coming back, after one of those intimate catastrophes that metamorphose a man. All my hopelessnesses were softened by the secret conviction that this refuge could not fail me, and in the depth of my abjectness a little light came to me from that woman who, for love of me and by my work, had raised herself to the summit of greatness and had perfectly realized the form of my ideal.