Thus, the inexorable specters of the past pursued me without respite;
thus, Brigitte seeing herself treated alternately, as a faithless
mistress and a shameless woman, fell into a condition of melancholy that
clouded our entire life; and worst of all, that sadness even, the cause
of which I knew, was not the most burdensome of our sorrows. I was young
and I loved pleasure; that daily association with a woman older than I
who suffered and languished, that face more and more serious, which was
always before me, all that repelled my youth and aroused within me bitter
regrets for the liberty I had lost.
When we were passing through the forest by the beautiful light of the
moon, we both experienced a profound melancholy. Brigitte looked at me in
pity. We sat down on a rock near a wild gorge; we passed two entire hours
there; her half-veiled eyes plunged into my soul athwart the glance from
mine, then wandered to nature, to the heavens and the valley.
"Ah! my dear child," she said, "how I pity you! You do not love me."
In order to reach that rock, one must travel two leagues; two more in
returning makes four. Brigitte was afraid of neither fatigue nor
darkness. We set out at eleven at night, expecting to reach home some
time in the morning. When we went on long tramps, she always dressed in a
blue blouse and the apparel of a man, saying that skirts were not made
for bushes.
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