It was the first and only time of my life; but I was sublime: if
everything amiable and seducing with which the most tender and
ardent love can inspire the heart of man can be so called. What
intoxicating tears did I shed upon her knees! how many did I make
her to shed involuntarily! At length in an involuntary transport she
exclaimed: "No, never was man so amiable, nor ever was there one who
loved like you! But your friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart
is incapable of loving twice." I exhausted myself with sighs; I
embraced her- what an embrace! But this was all. She had lived alone
for the last six months, that is absent from her husband and lover;
I had seen her almost every day during three months, and love seldom
failed to make a third. We had supped tete-a-tete, we were alone, in
the grove by moonlight, and after two hours of the most lively and
tender conversation, she left this grove at midnight, and the arms
of her lover, as morally and physically pure as she had entered it.
Reader, weigh all these circumstances; I will add nothing more.
Do not, however, imagine that in this situation my passions left
me as undisturbed as I was with Theresa and mamma. I have already
observed I was this time inspired not only with love, but with love
and all its energy and fury. I will not describe either the
agitations, tremblings, palpitations, convulsionary emotions, nor
faintings of the heart, I continually experienced; these may be judged
of by the effect her image alone made upon me.
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