Chapter 12 - Page 2

noble woman. Alas! I have no merit! What
can I be to you? A child, attracted by effulgence of beauty and by
moral grandeur, as the insects are attracted to the light. You
cannot do otherwise than tread upon the flowers of my soul; they
are there at your feet, and all my happiness consists in your
stepping on them.

Absolute devotion, unbounded faith, love unquenchable,--all these
treasures of a true and tender heart are nothing, nothing! they
serve only to love with, they cannot win the love we crave.
Sometimes I do not understand why a worship so ardent does not
warm its idol; and when I meet your eye, so cold, so stern, I turn
to ice within me. Your disdain, /that/ is the acting force between
us, not my worship. Why? You cannot hate me as much as I love you;
why, then, does the weaker feeling rule the stronger? I loved
Felicite with all the powers of my heart; yet I forgot her in a
day, in a moment, when I saw you. She was my error; you are my
truth.

You have, unknowingly, destroyed my happiness, and yet you owe me
nothing in return. I loved Camille without hope, and I have no
hope from you; nothing is changed but my divinity. I was a pagan;
I am now a Christian, that is all--

Except this: you have taught me that to love is the greatest of
all joys; the joy of being loved comes later. According to
Camille, it is not loving to love for a short time only; the love
that does not grow from day to day, from hour to hour, is a mere
wretched passion. In order to grow, love must not see its end; and
she saw the end of ours, the setting of our sun of love. When I
beheld you, I understood her words, which, until then, I had
disputed with all my youth, with all the ardor of my desires, with
the despotic sternness of twenty years. That grand and noble
Camille mingled her tears with mine, and yet she firmly rejected
the love she saw must end. Therefore I am free to love you here on
earth and in the heaven above us, as we love God. If you loved me,
you would have no such arguments as Camille used to overthrow my
love. We are both young; we could fly on equal wing across our
sunny heaven, not fearing storms as that grand eagle feared them.

But ha! what am I saying? my thoughts have carried me beyond the
humility of my real hopes. Believe me, believe in the submission,
the patience, the mute adoration which I only ask you not to wound
uselessly. I know, Beatrix, that you cannot love me without the
loss of your self-esteem; therefore I ask for no return. Camille
once said there was some hidden fatality in names, /a propos/ of
hers. That fatality I felt for myself on the jetty of Guerande,
when I read on the shores of the ocean your name. Yes, you will
pass through my life as