"A man may form a
plan, cherish it for a long time, and at the last moment abandon it; it
often happens so."
He reproached himself for having answered so hastily. Albert had had
only serious suspicions, and he had changed them to certainty. What
stupidity!
"There can be no possible doubt," he said to himself; "Valerie has
destroyed the most conclusive letters, those which appeared to her the
most dangerous, those I wrote after the substitution. But why has she
preserved these others, compromising enough in themselves? and why,
after having preserved them, has she let them go out of her possession?"
Without moving, Albert awaited a word from the count. What would it be?
No doubt, the old nobleman was at that moment deciding what he should
do.
"Perhaps she is dead!" said M. de Commarin aloud.
And at the thought that Valerie was dead, without his having again seen
her, he started painfully. His heart, after more than twenty years of
voluntary separation, still suffered, so deeply rooted was this first
love of his youth. He had cursed her; at this moment he pardoned her.
True, she had deceived him; but did he not owe to her the only years of
happiness he had ever known? Had she not formed all the poetry of his
youth? Had he experienced, since leaving her, one single hour of joy
or forgetfulness? In his present frame of mind, his heart retained only
happy memories, like a vase which, once filled with precious perfumes,
retains the odour until it is destroyed.
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