"Soon after I had danced with him, the king left: Herman, who belonged to the suite, had to follow him. With him, everything in nature disappeared. It is no good to try to depict the excess of weariness with which I felt weighed down, as soon as he was out of my sight. It was equal only to the keenness of my desire to be alone with myself.
"At last I got away. No sooner the door of my room shut and bolted than I wanted to resist my passion. I thought I should succeed. Ah, dear friend, believe me I paid dear that evening and the following days for the pleasure of being able to credit myself with some virtue."
The preceding lines are the exact story of an event which was the topic of the day; for after a month or two poor Wilhelmina was unfortunate enough for people to take notice of her feelings. Such was the origin of that long series of troubles by which she perished so young and so tragically—poisoned by herself or her lover. All that we could see in this young Captain was that he was an excellent dancer; he had plenty of gaiety and still more assurance, a general air of good nature and spent his time with prostitutes; for the rest, scarcely a nobleman, quite poor and not seen at Court.
In these cases it is not enough to have no misgivings—one must be sick of misgivings—have, so to speak, the impatience of courage to face life's chances.
The soul of a woman, grown tired, without noticing it, of living without loving, convinced in spite of herself by the example of other women—all the fears of life surmounted and the sorry happiness of pride found wanting—ends in creating unconsciously a model, an ideal. One day she meets this model: crystallisation recognises its object by the commotion it inspires and consecrates for ever to the master of its fortunes the fruit of all its previous dreams.[2]
Women, whose hearts are open to this misfortune, have too much grandeur of soul to love otherwise than with passion. They would be saved if they could stoop to gallantry.
As "thunderbolts" come from a secret lassitude in what the catechism calls Virtue, and from boredom brought on by the uniformity of perfection, I should be inclined to think that it would generally be the privilege of what is known in the world as "a bad lot" to bring them down. I doubt very much whether rigidity à la Cato has ever been the occasion of a "thunderbolt."
What makes them so rare is that if the heart, thus disposed to love beforehand, has the slightest inkling of its situation, there is no thunderbolt.
The soul of a woman, whom troubles have made mistrustful, is not susceptible of this revolution.
Nothing facilitates "a thunderbolt" like praise, given in advance and by women, to the person who is to occasion it.