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thing with her eyes when trying to understand something; she furrows her brow slightly and looks forward as if having trouble seeing, then says “yes” to herself; now she understands
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    I am well aware as I copy those words out for you that I am powerless to describe the happy memories she conjures for me. Why did I feel such a sense of perfection? Were the things Odile said remarkable? I think not, but she had what all the Marcenats lacked: a lust for life. We love people because they secrete a mysterious essence, the one missing from our own formula to make us a stable chemical compound. I may not have known women more beautiful than Odile, but I knew plenty who were more brilliant, more perfectly intelligent, yet not one ofthem managed to bring the physical world within my grasp as she did. Having been distanced from it by too much reading, too much solitary meditation, I now discovered trees and flowers and the smell of the earth, all sorts of things picked by Odile every morning and laid in bunches at my feet.
    When I had been alone in the city, I had spent my days in museums, or I stayed in my room reading about Venice and Rome. It was as if the outside world reached me only through masterpieces. Odile immediately introduced me to the world of colors and sounds. She took me to the flower market under the lofty arches of the Mercato Nuovo. She mingled with local women buying sprigs of lily of the valley or branches of lilac. She liked the old country priest haggling over laburnum shoots coiled around tall reeds. On the hills below San Miniato, she showed me narrow roads framed by stiflingly hot walls above which burgeoning wisterias trailed their clusters of flowers.
    Did I bore her when I explained with my characteristic Marcenat earnestness the rivalries between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Dante’s life, or Italy’s economic situation? I do not think so. Who is it who said that, between man and woman, it isoften a naïve, almost stupid, utterance from the woman that makes the invincible man want to kiss that childish mouth, whereas for the woman it is often when the man is at his most serious and most uncompromisingly logical that she in turn loves him best? Perhaps this was true of Odile and me. In any event, I know that when she murmured pleadingly “Do let’s stop” as we passed some shop selling fake jewelry, I never criticized her but simply thought “how I love her,” and I heard ever more powerfully the theme of the guardian knight and of devotion unto death that had gone hand in hand with my notion of love ever since childhood.
    Every part of me picked up on this theme again now. Just as in an orchestra where one isolated flute outlines a short phrase and seems to waken by turns the violins and cellos, then the brass section, until a great rhythmic wave sweeps through the concert hall, so a picked flower, the smell of wisteria, black and white churches, Botticelli and Michelangelo all successively joined the formidable chorus that expressed my happiness in loving Odile and protecting her perfect fragile beauty from an invisible enemy.
    On my first evening, I might have wished for the inaccessible privilege of a two-hour walk with theyoung lady I had glimpsed. But a few days later, it felt like intolerable slavery having to return to the hotel for dinner. Not knowing much about me, Madame Malet was anxious and tried to slow the progress of our intimacy, but you know what the first stirrings of love are like in two young people; the forces they awaken feel irresistible. We genuinely felt waves of empathy forming wherever we went. Odile’s beauty alone would have been enough for that. But she told me that as a couple we were even more successful among this Italian population than she had been on her own. The Florentine coachmen were grateful to us for being in love. Museum attendants smiled at us. Boatmen on the Arno looked up to watch indulgently as we leaned on a parapet, standing close together