He looked as he did that evening, when he leaned over my table
and unfolded to me his catechism of vice.
I kept my eyes on the book and I felt vaguely stirring in my memory some
forgotten words of the past. The spirit of doubt hanging over my head had
injected into my veins a drop of poison; the vapor mounted to my head and
I staggered like a drunken man. What secret was Brigitte concealing from
me? I knew very well that I had only to bend over and open the book; but
at what place? How could I recognize the leaf on which my eye had chanced
to fall?
My pride, moreover, would not permit me to take the book; was it indeed
pride? "O God!" I said to myself with a frightful sense of sadness, "is
the past a specter? and can it come out of its tomb? Ah! wretch that I
am, can I never love?"
All my ideas of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity
which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my mind;
and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a parade
of them, now it seemed that they were real or at least that they had
been.
I had known Madame Pierson four months, but I knew nothing of her past
life and had never questioned her about it. I had yielded to my love for
her with confidence and without reservation. I found a sort of pleasure
in taking her just as she was, for just what she seemed, while suspicion
and jealousy are so foreign to my nature that I was more surprised at
feeling them toward Brigitte than she was in discovering them in me.
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