This day one letter in particular caught his eye. It was simple, nevertheless, without seeming to reveal anything; but he looked at it uneasily, with a sort of chill at his heart. He thought: “From whom can it be? I certainly know this writing, and yet I can't identify it.”
He raised it to a level with his face, holding it delicately between two fingers, striving to read through the envelope, without making up his mind to open it.
Then he smelled it, and snatched up from the table a little magnifying glass which he used in studying all the niceties of handwriting. He suddenly felt unnerved. “Whom is it from? This hand is familiar to me, very familiar. I must have often read its tracings, yes, very often. But this must have been a long, long time ago. Whom the deuce can it be from? Pooh! it's only somebody asking for money.”
And he tore open the letter. Then he read:
MY DEAR FRIEND: You have, without doubt, forgotten me, for it is now
twenty-five years since we saw each other. I was young; I am old.
When I bade you farewell, I left Paris in order to follow into the
provinces my husband, my old husband, whom you used to call “my
hospital.” Do you remember him? He died five years ago, and now I
am returning to Paris to get my daughter married, for I have a
daughter, a beautiful girl of eighteen, whom you have never seen.
I informed you of her birth, but you certainly did not pay much
attention to so trifling an event.
You are still the handsome Lormerin; so I have been told. Well, if
you still recollect little Lise, whom you used to call Lison, come
and dine with her this evening, with the elderly Baronne de Vance
your ever faithful friend, who, with some emotion, although happy,
reaches out to you a devoted hand, which you must clasp, but no
longer kiss, my poor Jaquelet.
LISE DE VANCE.
Lormerin's heart began to throb. He remained sunk in his armchair with the letter on his knees, staring straight before him, overcome by a poignant emotion that made the tears mount up to his eyes!
If he had ever loved a woman in his life it was this one, little Lise, Lise de Vance, whom he called “Ashflower,” on account of the strange color of her hair and the pale gray of her eyes. Oh! what a dainty, pretty, charming creature she was, this frail baronne, the wife of that gouty, pimply baron, who had abruptly carried her off to the provinces, shut her up, kept her in seclusion through jealousy, jealousy of the handsome Lormerin.
Yes, he had loved her, and he believed that he too, had been truly loved. She familiarly gave him, the name of Jaquelet, and would pronounce that word in a delicious fashion.
A thousand forgotten memories came back to him, far, off and sweet and melancholy now. One evening she had called on him on her way home from a ball, and they went for a stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, she in evening dress, he in his dressing-jacket. It was springtime; the weather was beautiful. The fragrance from her bodice embalmed the warm air-the odor of her bodice, and perhaps, too, the fragrance of her skin. What a divine night! When they reached the lake, as the moon's rays fell across the branches into the water, she began to weep. A little surprised, he asked her why.
“I don't know. The moon and the water have affected me. Every time I see poetic things I have a tightening at the heart, and I have to cry.”