In spite of all, he could no longer identify himself with the same man of whom those written phrases attested such consternation and despair; he felt that these effusions of his love had become strangers to him, and he also felt all the emptiness of the words. These letters resembled the epitaphs which one reads in cemeteries. Just as the epitaphs give a coarse, false idea of the dead, so these letters represented inaccurately the divers conditions of the soul through which his love had passed. He knew well the singular fever which seizes a lover when writing a love-letter. In the heat of this fever, all the different waves of sentiment are agitated and mixed in a confused turmoil. The lover does not know precisely what he wishes to express, and he is embarrassed by the material insufficiency of the terms of endearment; so he gives up trying to describe his internal passion such as it is, and attempts to express its intensity by the exaggeration of the phrases and by the employment of vulgar rhetorical effects. This is the reason why all amorous correspondences resemble each other, and why the language of the most exalted passion is almost as poor as jargon.
"In these letters," thought George, "all is violence, excess, convulsion. But where are my delicate feelings? Where my exquisite and complex melancholies? Where my profound and sinuous sorrows, in which my soul went astray as in an inextricable labyrinth?" He now had the regret to perceive that his letters lacked the rarest qualities of his mind—those which he had always cultivated with the greatest care. In the course of his reading, he began to skip the long passages of pure eloquence, and sought instead the indication of particulars—the details of events that had occurred—the allusions to memorable episodes.
He found in one letter: "Towards six o'clock I entered mechanically the usual place, the Morteo Garden, where I had seen you so many evenings. The thirty-five minutes that preceded the exact hour of your departure were a torture for me. You left, yes, you left without my having been able to bid you good-by, to cover your face with kisses, to repeat to you once more, 'Don't forget! don't forget!' Towards eleven o'clock a kind of instinct made me turn round. Your husband entered with his friend, and the lady who usually accompanies them. Without any doubt, they had come back from seeing you home. I had then such a cruel spasm of pain that I was soon forced to rise and go out. The presence of these three persons, who spoke and laughed as on other evenings, as if nothing new had happened, exasperated me. Their presence was for me the visible and indubitable proof that you were gone, irremissibly gone."
He thought over more of the summer evenings, when he had seen Hippolyte seated at a table, between her husband and a captain of infantry, opposite to a little, insignificant woman. He did not know any of these three persons, but he suffered at each of their gestures, at each of their attitudes, and at all that was vulgar in their appearance; and in imagination he pictured to himself the imbecility of the talk to which his refined mistress appeared to pay sustained attention.
In another letter he found: "I am in doubt. To-day I feel hostile towards you; I am filled with a dull anger."
"That," said Hippolyte, "was the time when I was at Rimini: August and September—what tempestuous months they were! Do you remember when you finally arrived on the Don Juan?"
"Here is a letter written on board ship: 'To-day at two o'clock we have anchored at Ancona, having sailed from Porto San Giorgio. Your prayers and wishes have sent us a favorable wind. Marvellous sailing, which I will recount to you. At the break of day we shall again make the offing. The Don Juan is the king of coasters. Your flag floats from the mast-head. Addio—maybe till to-morrow. September 2d.'"
"We saw one another again; but what days of suffering! Do you remember? We were watched incessantly. Oh, that good sister! Do you recall our visit to the Temple of the Malatestas? Do you remember our pilgrimage to the Church of San Giuliano, the evening before your departure?"
"Here is another from Venice."
They read it together, with equal palpitation.