"'Ah yes!'said he,taking up the thread of his confidences.'From the violence of my speech you may,you must believe in the intensity of a physical passion which for nine years has absorbed all my faculties;but that is nothing in comparison with the worship I feel for the soul,the mind,the heart,all in that woman;the enchanting divinities in the train of Love,with whom we pass our life,and who form the daily poem of a fugitive delight.By a phenomenon of retrospection I see now the graces of Honorine's mind and heart,to which I paid little heed in the time of my happiness--like all who are happy.From day to day I have appreciated the extent of my loss,discovering the exquisite gifts of that capricious and refractory young creature who has grown so strong and so proud under the heavy hand of poverty and the shock of the most cowardly desertion.And that heavenly blossom is fading in solitude and hiding!--Ah!The law of which we were speaking,'he went on with bitter irony,'the law is a squad of gendarmes--my wife seized and dragged away by force!Would not that be to triumph over a corpse?Religion has no hold on her;she craves its poetry,she prays,but she does not listen to the commandments of the Church.I,for my part,have exhausted everything in the way of mercy,of kindness,of love;I am at my wits'end.Only one chance of victory is left to me;the cunning and patience with which bird-catchers at last entrap the wariest birds,the swiftest,the most capricious,and the rarest.Hence,Maurice,when M.de Grandville's indiscretion betrayed to you the secret of my life,Iended by regarding this incident as one of the decrees of fate,one of the utterances for which gamblers listen and pray in the midst of their most impassioned play.Have you enough affection for me to show me romantic devotion?'
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