But they loved each other so purely that the
impression of that scene, both cruel and beneficent, could not fail to
leave its traces in their souls; both were eager to make those traces
disappear, each striving to be the first to return to the other, and
thus they could not fail to think of the cause of their first
variance. To loving souls, this is not grief; pain is still far-off;
but it is a sort of mourning, which is difficult to depict. If there
are, indeed, relations between colors and the emotions of the soul,
if, as Locke's blind man said, scarlet produces on the sight the
effect produced upon the hearing by a blast of trumpets, it is
permissible to compare this reaction of melancholy to mourning tones
of gray.
But even so, love saddened, love in which remains a true sentiment of
its happiness, momentarily troubled though it be, gives enjoyments
derived from pain and pleasure both, which are all novel. Jules
studied his wife's voice; he watched her glances with the freshness of
feeling that inspired him in the earliest days of his passion for her.
The memory of five absolutely happy years, her beauty, the candor of
her love, quickly effaced in her husband's mind the last vestiges of
an intolerable pain.
The day was Sunday,--a day on which there was no Bourse and no
business to be done. The reunited pair passed the whole day together,
getting farther into each other's hearts than they ever yet had done,
like two children who in a moment of fear, hold each other closely and
cling together, united by an instinct.
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