"March 30th: Spring has come on its own day this year, a rare thing. In the streets and over the squares floats a delicate light, a slight fog. The trees are beginning to show their buds and tiny leaves. As one walks, somewhat out of practice since the winter, one feels a pleasant lassitude, as if carrying a burden of gladness.
"I look at the women as they pass, more graceful in their lighter suits. One of them, it is inevitable, is coming into my life as into an open garden. I am watching for her without settling my choice on anyone. A harmless dream which amuses me."
"April: Which? I am at times like a huntsman on the alert. And then I give up so futile a pursuit.
"My first love is the symbol of my sentimental life. I was fifteen and the young girl whom I loved was seventeen or eighteen. I looked at her from afar, yet I dared not speak to her. To see her gave me happiness that was almost too much to bear. What more could I desire? She guessed my secret, and it was she who offered her heart to me. But I refused her, assuring her that she was wrong in believing she loved me. I could not admit that my love ceased to be a painful exaltation.
"When Elizabeth passed through the streets of Grenoble, I stopped, not to gaze upon her longer, but because I could not make advances.
"I find myself again in that state of languor and expectation, but without cause. My thoughts are quite fixed upon the future. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, when you came into my life, I believed the sun rose in you. Why have you allowed the darkness to fall? Our hearth exhales death and night. I can no longer bear that state of apathy which is neither sorrow nor joy, that listlessness into which I am sinking. Do you not see the danger? And if the well-spring of my mental activity, thus parched, were to dry up! A man's brain is a delicate mechanism. An awkward hand is sufficient to warp it. And it is because I am tired that I am returning to lectures, articles, essays, to all those rapid works which mislead us about our power of production. But you were not capable of giving me a different love, not to me, nor to anyone else...."
"April 25th: Next week a history congress in London. They have asked me for a lecture on the condition of the peasant in France before the Revolution."
The second of Albert Derize's note-books concluded with this information.
IV
ANNE DE SÉZERY
There was only one more book. On the first blank page appeared this notice in pencil: "To be destroyed without reading," as a precaution taken in case of accident.