He was still young enough to feel the
tyrannous fascination which fully-developed womanhood exerts over
immature and impassioned natures; and, consequently, he was to spend
one of those stormy nights when a young man's thoughts travel from
happiness to suicide and back again--nights in which youth rushes
through a lifetime of bliss and falls asleep from sheer exhaustion.
Fateful nights are they, and the worst misfortune that can happen is
to awake a philosopher afterwards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in
love to sleep; he rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of
them were satisfactory, and he burned them all.
The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of her garden
walls, but he waited till nightfall; he was afraid that she might see
him. The instinct that led him to act in this way arose out of so
obscure a mood of the soul, that none but a young man, or a man in
like case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries,
matter to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in
its matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful
hesitation, Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter,
which may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to
lovers, a performance which, like the drawings prepared with great
secrecy by children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found
insufferable by every mortal except the recipients:--
"MADAME,--Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day.
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