Elaine loves me, as much as I adore her.
She left her parental abode, as if she was going to some festivity,
without turning round toward all that she had left behind her in the way
of affection and recollection, and without even a farewell tear, which
the first kiss effaces, on her long turned-up lashes.
She looked like a bird which had escaped from its cage, and does not
know where to settle, which beats its wings in the intoxication of the
light, and which warbles incessantly. She repeated the same words, as if
she had been rather intoxicated, and her laugh sounded like the cooing
of a pigeon, and looking into my eyes, with her eyes full of languor,
and her arms round my neck like a bracelet, and with her burning cheek
against mine, she suddenly exclaimed:
"I say, my darling, would you not give ten years of your life to have
already got to the end of the journey?"
And that passionate question so disconcerted me, that I did not know
what to reply, and my brain reeled, as if I had been at the edge of a
precipice. Did she already know what her mother had not told her? Had
she already learned what she ought to have been ignorant of? And had
that heart, which I used to compare to _the Vessel of Election_, of
which the litanies of Our Lady speak, already been damaged?
Oh! white veils, that hide the blushes, the half-closed eyes and the
trembling lips of some _Psyche_, oh! little hands which you raised in
an attitude of prayer toward the lighted and decorated altar, oh!
innocent and charming questions, which delighted me to the depths of my
being, and which seemed to me to be an absolute promise of happiness,
were you nothing but a lie, and a wonderfully well acted piece of
trickery?
But was I not wrong, and an idiot, to allow such thoughts to take
possession of me, and to poison my deep, absorbing love, which was now
my only law and my only object, by odious and foolish suggestions? What
an abject and miserable nature I must have, for such a simple,
affectionate, natural question to disturb me so, when I ought
immediately to have replied to Elaine's question, with all my heart that
belonged to hear:
"Yes, ten or twenty years, because you are my happiness, my desire, my
love!"