Marianne, how he loved her! From day to day, how his love of her increased like a madman's! It seemed to him that he suddenly found himself in the presence of the only woman who could possibly understand him, and in the only world in which he could live; his petty bourgeois, sensual inexperience flourished in the little hôtel of the courtesan.
He had doubtless loved; often enough he had thought himself once more in love; the poor grisettes, to whom he had written in verse, as he might have sung songs to them, were gone from his thoughts, though they had occupied his heart for a short time. He had profoundly loved her who bore his name, perhaps he loved her still as warmly, as sincerely—the unfortunate man!—as of old. He sometimes recalled with tearful eye, how his whole frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity, in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.
When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and that his marrow had been touched. This man of forty felt all the enthusiasm and distraction of a youth. It seemed to him that this was the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for which he would have braved and risked everything.
When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the woman's self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a questioning yes:
"Yes?"
Simply that.
And in this yes, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and burning promises for Sulpice.
Then he drew her to him:
"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise, and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.
Yes! And he would have uttered this yes before every one like a bravado. Yes! It was his delight to give himself wholly to Marianne and to tell her again and again that nothing in the whole world could take the place of this mistress who made him forget everything: politics, the home, the ambition that had been his life, and his affection for Adrienne that had been his joy.