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158 creaking of the sofa, Juliette's remarks, her conversation with Spy all this was sufficient to put to rout the few ideas which I strove to bring together. My thoughts would turn immediately to ordinary matters, and I meditated upon painful things and lived sorrowful things over again. . . . Juliette. . . . Did I love her? Many times this question arose in my mind, pregnant with horrible doubt. . . . Had I not been deceived by the stupefaction of my senses? . . . Was not this thing which I took for love, the ephemeral and fleeting manifestation of a pleasure as yet untasted? . . . Juliette! . . . Of course I loved her. ..

But this Juliette whom I loved, was she not altogether different, was she not the Juliette that I had myself created, that had been born of my own imagination, that had originated in my own brains, whom I had endowed with a soul, with a spark of divinity, whom I had fashioned into being with the ideal essence of angels? . . . And did I not still love her as one does a beautiful book, a beautiful verse, a beautiful statue, a visible and tangible realization of an artist's dream! . . . But this other Juliette! . . . This one here? . . . This pretty, senseless, ignorant animal, this knick-knack, this piece of cloth, this nothing? . ..

I studied her carefully while she was polishing her nails. . . . Oh, how I would have liked to break this neck and sound its emptiness, to open this heart and probe its nothingness! And I said to myself: "What sort of a life will mine be with this woman whose tastes are only for pleasure, who is happy only when she is dressed up, whose every wish costs a fortune, who in spite of her chaste appearance, has an instinctive predilection for vice; who used to leave unhappy Malterre every evening, without a single regret, without a single thought; who will leave me tomorrow,