I often repeated
to myself the most affecting and impassioned passages, adding in fancy
her voice, her gesture, her tone, her look; I would answer her, and
thus succeed in producing such a complete delusion of her real
presence, that I felt impatient and annoyed when I was summoned to
meals, or interrupted by visitors; at these times it seemed as though
she were torn from me, or driven away from my room. In my long rambles
on the mountains, or in those misty plains without an horizon which
border the Saone, I always took her last letter with me, and would sit
on the rocks, or on the edge of the water, amid the ice and snow, to
read it over and over again. Each time I fancied I discovered some word
or expression that had escaped my notice before. I remember that I
always instinctively directed my course towards the north, as if each
step I took in the direction of Paris brought me nearer to her, and
diminished the cruel distance that separated us. Sometimes I went very
far on the Paris road under this impression, and when it was time to
return, I had always a severe struggle with myself.
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