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234 was losing Juliette, losing her daily, every hour, every minute; and with this chain of successive deaths, with this process of impenitent dying, I could only associate memories of torture and disgrace.

No matter how eagerly I searched in the stirred-up depths of our two hearts for a flower bud, for a tiny blossom whose fragrance it would have been so sweet to inhale, I could not find it. And yet I could not conceive anything dissociated from Juliette. All my thoughts had Juliette for their starting point and for their final goal, and the more she escaped me the more fiercely obdurate I grew in my absurd desire to win her back. I had no hope at all that she would ever stop, carried away as she was by this life of evil pleasure; yet, in spite of myself, in spite of her, I was planning for a better future. I said to myself: "It is impossible that some day disgust will not seize her, that some day sorrow will not awaken remorse and pity in her heart. Then she will return to me. Then we will move into a plain workman's house and I shall work like a galley-slave. I'll enter journalism, I'll publish novels, I'll ask for a job as a plain copyist." Alas! I forced myself to believe all this so as to accentuate the state of misery into which I had fallen. With the proceeds from the sale of two sketches by Lirat, of a few jewels I still had, of my books, I had realized a sum of four thousand francs, which I was saving like a treasure for that chimeric eventuality.

One day when Juliette was pensive and tenderer than usual, I ventured to lay my project before her. She clasped her hands.

"Yes! Yes! Ah! Won't that be nice! A little bit of an apartment, a tiny one. I'll do the housekeeping, I'll have pretty bonnets, a pretty apron! But with you it'll be impossible! What a pity! It's impossible!"

"Why is it impossible? "