“Believe me if all those endearing young charms.”
How often, through that long night journey, did I repeat:
“Idiot! why did you leave? You might have seen her again to-morrow.” True, but the fear of being troublesome restrained me and what could I have done in Lyons during the hours we were apart? it would have been but torture.
After a few miserable days of indecision in Paris I wrote the following letter, which shows my deplorable state and her beautiful calm.
How much worse off am I now that I cannot even write to her! To enjoy that romantic friendship to the end would have been too great a blessing. Wounded, torn, alone, unsatisfied must I totter to my grave!
“Paris, 27th September 1864.—Madame! A thousand blessings on you for your gentle reception of me! Few women could have done as much; yet since our meeting, I suffer most cruelly. It is useless to repeat to myself that you could not have done more than you have; my wounded heart bleeds on unstaunched. I ask, why? why? and my only answer is: because I saw you so little; because I said but a tithe of all I wished; because we parted as if for ever.
“Yet I held your hand, I pressed it to my lips—to my forehead and kept back my tears as I had promised.
“And now the inexorable thirst for another word from you has conquered me; in pity grant it!
“Think! for forty-five years I have loved you; you are my childhood’s dream that has weathered all the storms of my most stormy life. It must be true—this love of a life-time—could it, else, master me as it still does?
“Do not take me for an eccentric, a plaything of my own imagination; I am but a man of intense sensibility, of eternal constancy and of overwhelmingly strong affections. I loved you, I love you still, I shall always love you, although I am sixty-one and for me the world has no more illusions.