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“One cannot both be and have been.”

“How beautiful life must have been for you!” I said.

She heaved a great sigh.

“Beautiful and sweet! And for that reason I regret it so much.”

I saw that she was disposed to talk of herself, so I began to question her, gently and discreetly, as one might touch bruised flesh.

She spoke of her successes, her intoxications and her friends, of her whole triumphant existence.

“Was it on the stage that you found your most intense joys, your true happiness?” I asked.

“Oh, no!” she replied quickly.

I smiled; then, raising her eyes to the two portraits, she said, with a sad glance:

“It was with them.”

“Which one?” I could not help asking.

“Both. I even confuse them up a little now in my old woman’s memory, and then I feel remorse.”

“Then, madame, your acknowledgment is not to them, but to Love itself. They were merely its interpreters.”

“That is possible. But what interpreters!”

“Are you sure that you have not been, or that you might not have been, loved as well or better by a simple man, but not a great man, who would have offered to you his whole life and heart, all his thoughts, all his days, his whole being, while these gave you two redoubtable rivals, Music and Poetry?”

“No, monsieur, no!” she exclaimed emphatically, with that still youthful voice, which caused the soul to vibrate. “Another one might perhaps have loved me more, but he would not have loved me as these did. Ah! those two sang to me of the music of love as no one else in the world could have sung of it. How they intoxicated me! Could any other man express what they knew so well how to express in tones and in words? Is it enough merely to love if one cannot put all the poetry and all the music of heaven and earth into love? And they knew how to make a woman delirious with songs and with words. Yes, perhaps there was more of illusion than of reality in our passion; but these illusions lift you into the clouds, while realities always leave you trailing in the dust. If others have loved me more, through these two I have understood, felt and worshipped love.”

Suddenly she began to weep.

She wept silently, shedding tears of despair.

I pretended not to see, looking off into the distance. She resumed, after a few minutes:

“You see, monsieur, with nearly every one the heart ages with the body. But this has not happened with me. My body is sixty-nine years old, while my poor heart is only twenty. And that is the reason why I live all alone, with my flowers and my dreams.”

There was a long silence between us. She grew calmer and continued, smiling:

“How you would laugh at me, if you knew, if you knew how I pass my evenings, when the weather is fine. I am ashamed and I pity myself at the same time.”

Beg as I might, she would not tell me what she did. Then I rose to leave.

“Already!” she exclaimed.

And as I said that I wished to dine at Monte Carlo, she asked timidly:

“Will you not dine with me? It would give me a great deal of pleasure.”

I accepted at once. She rang, delighted, and after giving some orders to the little maid she took me over her house.

A kind of glass-enclosed veranda, filled with shrubs, opened into the dining-room, revealing at the farther end the long avenue of orange trees extending to the foot of the mountain. A low seat, hidden by plants, indicated that the old actress often came there to sit down.

Then we went into the garden, to look at the flowers. Evening fell softly, one of those calm, moist evenings when the earth breathes forth all her perfumes. Daylight was almost gone when we sat down at table. The dinner was good and it lasted a long time, and we became intimate friends, she and I, when she understood what a profound sympathy she had aroused in my heart. She had taken two thimblefuls of wine, as the phrase goes, and had grown more confiding and expansive.