In place of the abstract expressions "the time when I was happy," "the
time when I was loved," which he had often used until then, and without
much suffering, for his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of
the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he
now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the peculiar, volatile
essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all; the snowy, curled
petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his
carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips, the address 'Maison
Doree,' embossed on the note-paper on which he had read "My hand trembles
so as I write to you," the frowning contraction of her eyebrows when she
said pleadingly: "You won't let it be very long before you send for me?";
he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he used to have in to
singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little working girl; could
feel the torrents of rain which fell so often that spring, the ice-cold
homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all the network of mental
habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory reactions, which had
extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes, by which his body now
found itself inextricably held.
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