Towards evening, I felt my heart leap for joy.
I heard my beautiful lady-love enter my room.
Anxiety, fasting, and a sleepless night had given me the appearance of real illness, and I was delighted by it. Suffering is never so sweet to a lover as when he hopes the woman who caused it will read it upon his face.
She came near me.
I received her coldly, and sent her away very soon, by telling her with perfect indifference,
"It is nothing, madam, but a bad headache. I am usually a subject to such attacks. I am sure that repose and diet would effect a speedy cure."
At eleven o'clock, she came back with her friend, M. D---- R-----, and coming to my bed she asked affectionately,
"What ails you, my poor Casanova?"
"A very bad headache, madam, which will be cured to-morrow."
"Why should you wait until to-morrow? You must get better at once. I have ordered a basin of broth and two new-laid eggs for you."
"Nothing, madam; complete abstinence can alone cure me."
"He is right," said M. D. R. "I know these attacks."
I shook my head slightly.
At that moment, M. D. R. turned aside to examine an engraving on the wall. Madame F. took my hand.
"I should like you to drink a little broth," she said.
As she spoke, I felt that she was giving me a small parcel.
Then she went to join M. D. R. before the engraving.
I opened the parcel, but feeling that it contained hair, I hurriedly concealed it under the bed-clothes.
At the same instant, the blood rushed to my head with such violence that I was frightened by it myself. The room seemed to redden. My temples beat like drums.
I begged for some water, she came to me, with M. D---- R-----, and then were both frightened to see me so red, when they had seen me pale and weak only one minute before.
Madame F. gave me a glass of water, adding a few drops of Eau des Carmes. The cordial acted at once, and violently. In two or three minutes I felt relieved.
"I believe," I said, "I could eat something."
Madame F. smiled.
The servant entered with the broth and eggs.
While I ate, I told the history of Pandolfin.
D. R. saw in my sudden recovery something close to a miracle, and I could read, on the countenance of the charming woman, love, affection, and repentance.
If M. D---- R---- had not been present, it would have been the moment of my happiness, but I felt certain that I should not have long to wait.
"If I had not seen you so ill," said M. D. R., "I would swear the whole sickness was a sham. For I did not think it possible for anyone to rally so rapidly."
"It is all owing to my Eau des carmes," said Madame F-----, looking at me, "and I will leave you my bottle."
"No, madam, be kind enough to take it with you, for the water would have no virtue without your presence."
"I am sure of that," said M. D---- R-----, "so I will leave you here with your patient."
"No, no, he must go to sleep now."
That night I slept deeply.
In my dreams she was with me, and happiness visited me with such force that reality itself could hardly have surpassed it. I woke rested, light, and certain that I had advanced farther in one day of suffering than in months of wit, patience, and obedience.
Twenty-four hours of fasting had given me the right to speak openly of my love, and the gift of her hair was an irrefutable confession of her own feelings.
The next day, after presenting myself to M. F., I went to exchange a few words with the maid while waiting until her mistress was visible.
I had not long to wait.
From the next room, I heard Madame F. laugh when the maid told her I was there.
As soon as I appeared, she gave me no time to speak.
"I am delighted to see you looking so well," she said. "You must go and call upon M. D. R."
It is not only in the eyes of a lover, but also in those of every man of taste, that a woman is a thousand times more lovely at the moment she comes out of the arms of Morpheus than when she has completed her toilet.
Around Madame F---- more brilliant beams were blazing than around the sun when he leaves the embrace of Aurora. Yet the most beautiful woman thinks as much of her toilet as the one who cannot do without it--very likely because more human creatures possess the more they want.
Her order to visit M. D. R. did not discourage me.
On the contrary, I took it as another sign of approaching happiness. By dismissing me so soon, she was not rejecting me. She was only trying to postpone the consummation which I might have pressed upon her, and which she could not have refused.
Rich in the possession of her hair, I held a consultation with my love to decide what I ought to do with it.
Madame F----, very likely in her wish to atone for the miserly sentiment which had refused me a small bit, had given me a splendid lock, full a yard and a half long.
After much reflection, I went to a Jewish confectioner whose daughter was known to be skilful with the needle. I placed the hair before her and made her work under my observation.
On a bracelet of green satin, she embroidered the four initials of our names.
With the rest, she made a very fine chain.
I had a piece of black ribbon added to one end of the chain, in the shape of a sliding noose, with which I could easily strangle myself if ever love should reduce me to despair, and I passed it round my neck.
Then, unwilling to lose even the smallest particle of so precious a treasure, I took scissors and carefully gathered every remaining fragment. The little cuttings lay before me like sacred dust. I reduced them to a fine powder and ordered the confectioner to mix it, in my presence, with a paste of amber, sugar, vanilla, angelica, alkermes, and storax.
I waited until the comfits were made.
I had another batch prepared with the same ingredients, but without the hair. The first I placed in a beautiful crystal sweetmeat box. The second went into one of tortoise-shell.
From the day Madame F. gave me her hair, and by that gift betrayed the secret feelings of her heart, I wasted no more time in relating stories or adventures.
I only spoke to her of my love, of my ardent desires; I told her that she must either banish me from her presence, or crown my happiness.
But the cruel, charming woman would accept neither alternative. She kept me near enough to burn and distant enough to despair.
"Happiness," she said, "cannot be obtained by offending every moral law and betraying our duty."
If I threw myself at her feet to obtain by anticipation her forgiveness for the loving violence I intended to use against her, she would repulse me more powerfully than if she had had the strength of a female Hercules, for she would say, in a voice full of sweetness and affection,
"My friend, I do not entreat you to respect my weakness, but be generous enough to spare me for the sake of all the love I feel for you."
"What!" I cried, "you love me, and you refuse to make me happy! It is impossible! it is unnatural. You compel me to believe that you do not love me. Only allow me to press my lips one moment upon your lips, and I ask no more."
"No, dearest, no; it would only excite the ardour of your desires, shake my resolution, and we should then find ourselves more miserable than we are now."
Thus did she every day plunge me in despair, and yet she complained that my wit was no longer brilliant in society, that I had lost that elasticity of spirits which had pleased her so much after my arrival from Constantinople. M. D---- R-----, who often jestingly waged war against me, used to say that I was getting thinner and thinner every day.
One day Madame F. looked at me with displeasure.
"Your sickly appearance is very disagreeable to me," she said, "because malicious tongues will not fail to say that I treat you with cruelty."
Strange, almost unnatural thought! On it I composed an idyll which I cannot read, even now, without feeling tears in my eyes.
"What!" I answered. "you acknowledge your cruelty towards me? You are afraid of the world guessing all your heartless rigour, and yet you continue to enjoy it! You condemn me unmercifully to the torments of Tantalus! You would be delighted to see me gay, cheerful, happy, even at the expense of a judgment by which the world would find you guilty of a supposed but false kindness towards me, and yet you refuse me even the slightest favours!"
"I do not mind people believing anything," she said, "provided it is not true."
"What a contrast! Would it be possible for me not to love you, for you to feel nothing for me? Such contradictions strike me as unnatural."
She turned away, but not quickly enough to hide that I had touched her.
"But you are growing thinner yourself," I continued, "and I am dying. It must be so; we shall both die before long, you of consumption, I of exhausting decline; for I am now reduced to enjoying your shadow during the day, during the night, always, everywhere, except when I am in your presence."
At that passionate declaration, delivered with all the ardour of an excited lover, she was surprised, deeply moved, and I thought that the happy hour had struck.
I took her in my arms.
She did not resist.
For one instant I tasted the first sweetness of victory. Her breath touched mine; her strength seemed to abandon her; all her proud arguments fell silent between us.
Then the sentinel knocked twice.
Oh! Fatal mischance!
I recovered myself at once and stood before her, shielding her confusion as best I could.
D. R. entered.
This time he found me in such cheerful spirits that he remained with us until one in the morning.
My comfits were beginning to be the talk of our society.
Only three persons possessed a box of them: M. D. R., Madame F., and myself. I was sparing with mine, and no one dared beg me for some, because I had taken care to say they were very expensive, and that in all Corfu there was neither a confectioner capable of making them nor a physician capable of discovering their composition.
I never gave one out of my crystal box, and Madame F. remarked it.
I did not believe them to be amorous philtre, and I was not foolish enough to suppose that the addition of her hair had improved their flavor, but a superstition, the offspring of my love, caused me to cherish them. It pleased me to think that a small part of the woman I adored entered into me and became part of my being.
Madame F., perhaps moved by some secret sympathy, loved the comfits extremely.
Before her friends, she declared them to be the universal panacea. Since she knew herself mistress of the inventor, she did not ask for the secret of the composition.
But having observed that I gave away only those from the tortoise-shell box, while I ate none but those from the crystal one.
She asked, "Why do you always keep those for yourself?"
I answered too quickly without taking time to think.
"Because mine contain an ingredient which makes the one who eats them love you."
She laughed.
"I do not believe it. But are they different from those I eat myself?"
"They are exactly the same, with the exception of the ingredient I have just mentioned, which has been put only in mine."
"Tell me what the ingredient is."
"It is a secret which I cannot reveal to you."
Her face changed.
"Then I will never eat any of your comfits."
She rose at once, emptied her box, and filled it with chocolate drops.
For several days she was angry with me and avoided my company.
I suffered. My spirits sank. Yet I could not bring myself to confess the truth.
I could not make up my mind to tell her that I was eating her hair!