So many years have passed away since that parting, never to fade out of my mind! Yes: he was the only man I could ever have loved.... How quickly it all passed away, and how completely it all came to an end! Strange.—A bit of life.
And now it sleeps, that happiness,—sleeps beneath the flowery palls of many a springtime, past and gone.
Such a spring; oh, well-a-day! And in my heart and life all is so blank and so dismal!
I have lived but a short, a very short time; and notwithstanding, how many and how fair flowers of memory have I culled! If I could only remember them all—all of them—why, then, life would be endurable still.
And I am ever, as I go on, closer and closer to life: I wade along, athwart its foaming and tempestuous current; but it is in vain I would try to plunge into its waves and moisten these lips of mine, so parched with thirst,—as if I were traversing a sea of quicksilver, whose dry metallic drops fly into liquid dust when they are touched.
And still I have to wait—to wait—to wait for something else, something like the spring in its glamour and its sunshine—to wait for a marvel, a prodigy, a miracle, that is to come!
In company with Gina and Owinski, I was just leaving a coffee-house. In front of us, surrounded by several men, there walked a woman, rather thickset, far from tall, who wore a short-skirted, bright-coloured dress, and a wide-brimmed hat, also of a bright hue. She went slowly, with an undulating motion of the hips, turning, now to right, now to left, now behind her, chattering with lively interest, and addressing them all together, her hands meanwhile nimble with gestures like those of a flower-girl offering nosegays. We caught glimpses of her profile,—very long lashes and a short straight nose. There seemed to be some witchery wafted towards me from that figure.
“A cocotte?” I asked Gina.
She looked at her, and nodded, with a lowering face.
We had previously been talking of love. She resumed the subject where I had interrupted her.