Alas! alas! I
have a clear-seeing mind, but a blind heart."
She was terrible in her knowledge of herself. She suffered and
analyzed her feelings as Cuvier and Dupuytren explained to friends the
fatal advance of their disease and the progress that death was making
in their bodies. Camille Maupin knew the passion within her as those
men of science knew their own anatomy.
"I have brought him here to judge him, and he is already bored," she
continued. "He pines for Paris, I tell him; the nostalgia of criticism
is on him; he has no author to pluck, no system to undermine, no poet
to drive to despair, and he dares not commit some debauch in this
house which might lift for a moment the burden of his ennui. Alas! my
love is not real enough, perhaps, to soothe his brain; I don't
intoxicate him! Make him drunk at dinner to-night and I shall know if
I am right. I will say I am ill, and stay in my own room."
Calyste turned scarlet from his neck to his forehead; even his ears
were on fire.
"Oh! forgive me," she cried. "How can I heedlessly deprave your
girlish innocence! Forgive me, Calyste--" She paused.
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