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By Root 1730 0

the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess. And if the change of fortune has been so rapid that our hearts have not had time to change, nature does not on that account despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then at the last moment that the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that very possession which nature, with diabolical cunning, uses to destroy our happiness. Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions.

I put my ten thousand francs in a drawer. But they were no longer of any use to me. I ran through them, as it happened, even more rapidly than if I had sent flowers every day to Gilberte, for when evening came I was always too wretched to stay at home and went to drown my sorrows in the arms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her house again now could only give me pain. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been anxious all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, often quite unwillingly, increases her power over us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, redoubles our chains, but also those which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order to keep our minds at rest. Only yesterday, had I not been afraid of annoying Gilberte, I should have been content to ask for no more than occasional meetings, which now would no longer have sufficed me and for which I should now have substituted quite different terms. For in this respect love is not like war; after each battle we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle. This was not my case with regard to Gilberte. Hence I preferred at first not to return to her mother’s house. I continued, it is true, to assure myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for some time, that I could see her again if I chose, and, if I did not choose, forget her in the long run. But these ideas, like a remedy which has no effect upon certain complaints, had no power whatsoever to obliterate those two parallel lines which I kept on seeing, traced by Gilberte and the young man as they slowly disappeared along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This was a new malady, which like the rest would gradually lose its force, a fresh image which would one day present itself to my mind’s eye completely purged of every noxious element that it now contained, like those deadly poisons which one can handle without danger, or like a crumb of dynamite which one can use to light one’s cigarette without fear of an explosion. Meanwhile there was in me another force which strove with all its might to overpower that unwholesome force which still showed me, without alteration, the figure of Gilberte walking in the dusk: to meet and to break the shock of the renewed assaults of memory, I had, toiling effectively in the opposite direction, imagination. The first of these two forces did indeed continue to show me that couple walking in the Champs-Elysées, and offered me other disagreeable pictures drawn from the past, as for instance Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay and entertain me. But the second force, working upon the canvas of my hopes, outlined a future far more attractively developed than this meagre past which was on