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By Root 1518 0

the sight of it unaccompanied by any belief in it gave me no pleasure. For a moment it merely gave an impression of unreality to everything around me. With dizzy speed the improbable signature danced about my bed, the fireplace, the four walls. I saw everything reel, as one does when one falls from a horse, and I asked myself whether there was not an existence altogether different from the one I knew, in direct contradiction to it, but itself the real one, which, being suddenly revealed to me, filled me with that hesitation which sculptors, in representing the Last Judgment, have given to the awakening dead who find themselves at the gates of the next world. “My dear friend,” said the letter, “I hear that you have been very ill and have given up going to the Champs-Elysées. I hardly ever go there either because there has been such an enormous lot of illness. But my friends come to tea here every Monday and Friday. Mamma asks me to tell you that it will be a great pleasure to us all if you will come too as soon as you are well again, and we can have some more nice talks here as we did in the Champs-Elysées. Good-bye, my dear friend; I hope that your parents will allow you to come to tea very often. With all my kindest regards. GILBERTE.”

While I was reading these words, my nervous system received, with admirable promptitude, the news that a great happiness had befallen me. But my mind, that is to say myself, in other words the party principally concerned, was still unaware of it. Happiness, happiness through Gilberte, was a thing I had never ceased to think of, a thing wholly in my mind—as Leonardo said of painting, cosa mentale. Now, a sheet of paper covered with writing is not a thing that the mind assimilates at once. But as soon as I had finished reading the letter, I thought of it, it became an object of reverie, it too became cosa mentale, and I loved it so much now that every few minutes I had to re-read it and kiss it. Then at last I was conscious of my happiness.

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope. It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I first went sea-bathing, in order to make me enjoy diving which I hated because it took away my breath, she used secretly to hand to my bathing instructor marvellous boxes made of shells, and branches of coral, which I believed that I myself discovered lying at the bottom of the sea. However, with every occurrence in life and its contrasting situations that relates to love, it is best to make no attempt to understand, since in so far as these are as inexorable as they are unlooked-for, they appear to be governed by magic rather than by rational laws. When a multi-millionaire—who for all his millions is a charming man—sent packing by a poor and unattractive woman with whom he has been living, calls to his aid, in his despair, all the resources of wealth and brings every worldly influence to bear without succeeding in making her take him back, it is wiser for him, in the face of the implacable obstinacy of his mistress, to suppose that Fate intends to crush him and to make him die of an affection of the heart rather than to seek any logical explanation. These obstacles against which lovers have to contend and which their imagination, over-excited by suffering, seeks in vain to analyse, are to be found, as often as not, in some peculiar characteristic of the woman whom they cannot win back—in her stupidity, in the influence acquired over her and the fears suggested to her by people whom the lover does not know, in the kind of pleasures which at that moment she demands of life, pleasures which neither her lover nor her lover’s wealth can procure for her. In any event, the lover is not in the best position to discover the nature of these obstacles which the woman’s guile conceals from him and his own judgment, distorted by love, prevents him from estimating exactly. They may