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ing, for which I had quivered with excitement, to which I
would have sacrificed everything else in the world, were by
no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were
the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scru-
pulous, undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover
in them one atom of pleasure. All the time that I was away
from Gilberte, I wanted to see her, because, having inces-
santly sought to form a mental picture of her, I was unable,
in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my
love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that
she loved me. Far from it, she had often boasted that she
knew other little boys whom she preferred to myself, that
I was a good companion, with whom she was always will-
ing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive
enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs
of apparent coldness towards me, which might have shaken
my faith that I was for her a creature different from the rest,
had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte had
felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon the love that I
felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults
of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in
which I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think
of Gilberte. But my feelings with regard to her I had never
yet ventured to express to her in words. Of course, on every
page of my exercise-books, I wrote out, in endless repetition,
her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines
which I might trace, without her having to think, on that
account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me,
not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but

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