'Come, come, it was not to write you such stuff that I sat down before my balcony, through the carving of which I can see the gondolas pass. They glide and slant and turn about, looking so pretty with their slim, funereal shapes. If each of these floating biers carried away one of my dead dreams, what an interminable procession there would be on the dreary waters! Would that I were an etcher! I know what Dance of Death I would engrave--a flight of these black barques in the twilight, with white skeletons as gondoliers at the prow and poop, and a row of ruined palaces for a background. Under it I should write: "Such is my heart!" After a youth more down-trodden than the grapes in the wine-tubs, and when I had just emerged from the miserable drudgery of my profession, it was this horrible slavery of love that stared me in the face--this love with its basis of hatred and contempt! Why, just Heaven!--why? Who could have guessed on that July evening when this madness began that I was entering upon one of the most solemn periods of my life? I had been dining alone after a hard day's work, and, in order to get a little fresh air and pass the time until ten o'clock, I was just strolling wherever my fancy took me, gazing idly at the passers-by. What invisible demon led my steps to the Comédie Française? Why did I go up into the green-room, where I had not been for months, to shake hands with old Farguet, about whom I did not care a rap? Why had I such a ready flow of wit and such brilliant repartee at my command at that very moment--I who, at fashionable dinners, had frequently found myself as dumb as the carp _à la Chambord_ on the dish? Why was Colette there in that adorable costume that belongs to the old _répertoire_? She was playing Rosine in the "Barber of Seville," and I went to the front to hear her sing the air, "When Love brings us spring again." Why did she look at me as she sang it, and show such real emotion that I dared scarcely believe it was meant for me? Why had she those lips, those eyes, that face on which might be read the sufferings of a conquered Psyche, a prey to love? How passionately we loved each other from that very first evening! And it was only the second time we had met. Can you understand how I was mad enough to expect fidelity from a girl who had thrown herself at me in that fashion? As soon as I got back behind the scenes she invited me into her dressing-room, and before we had been there a quarter of an hour her lips were pressed to mine in most painful ecstasy. Fool that I was! I ought to have taken her for what she was--a charming courtesan--and remembered that women are just the same to others as they are to us. Instead of which--