And yet when I had not met her in the course of the day, I felt sad and
disturbed; when evening came, I would go down to the garden, I knew not
why, and stay there, with my eyes riveted on her windows, spite of the
cold night air. I could not make up my mind to return to the house
until I had caught a glimpse of her shadow on the curtains, or heard a
note of her piano, or one of the strange tones of her voice.
The apartment she occupied was contiguous to my room, from which it was
separated by a strong oaken door with two bolts. I could hear
confusedly the sound of her footsteps, the rustling of her gown, or the
crumpling of the leaves of her book as she turned over the pages. I
sometimes fancied I heard her breathe. Instinctively I placed my
writing-table on which my lamp stood near the door, for I felt less
lonely when I heard these sounds of life around me. It seemed to me
that this unknown neighbor, who insensibly occupied all my time, shared
my life. In a word, before I had the slightest idea that I loved, I had
already all the thoughts, the fancies, and the refinements of passion.
Love did not consist for me in one particular symptom, look, or
confession, in any one external circumstance against which I could have
fortified myself. It was an invisible miasma diffused in the
surrounding atmosphere; it was in the air and light, in the expiring
season, in my lonely life, in the mysterious proximity of another
equally isolated existence; it was in the long excursions which took me
from her and made me feel the more forcibly the unconscious attraction
which recalled me; in her white dress, seen at a distance through the
mountain firs; in her dark hair loosened by the wind on the lake; in
the light at her window, in the slight creaking of the wooden floor
under her tread, in the rustling of her pen on the paper when she
wrote, in the very silence of those long autumnal evenings which she
spent in reading, writing, or in thought within a few paces of me; and
lastly, it was in the fascination of her fantastic beauty, too much
seen though scarcely beheld, and which, when I closed my eyes, I still
saw through the wall, as though it had been transparent.
With this feeling, however, there mingled no desire or eager curiosity,
on my part, to find out the secret reason of her solitude, or to break
down the fragile barrier of our almost voluntary separation. What to me
was this woman whom I had met by chance among the mountains of a
foreign land, ill in health and sick at heart though she might be? I
had shaken the dust from my feet, or at least I thought I had, and felt
no wish to hold to the world once more by any link of the mind, or of
the senses, still less by any weakness of the heart. I felt supreme
contempt for love, for under its name I had met only with affectation,
coquetry, fickleness, and levity; if I except the love of Antonina,
which had been but a childish ecstasy, a flower fallen from the stem
before its hour of perfume.