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to feel the warmth of each other’s body.
    I had wired my father to tell him I believed I could make a full recovery if I stayed another week or two. He consented. I now wanted Odile to myself all day. I hired a carriage and we took long drives together through the Tuscan countryside. On the way to Siena, we felt we were traveling through the background of a Carpaccio painting. The carriage launched up hillsides the shape of children’s sandcastles, and at the top we found improbable crenellated villages. We were enchanted by Siena’s vast shadows. As I lunched with Odile in a cool backstreet hotel, I already knew I would spend my whole life looking across at her. On the way back, in the darkness, her hand came to rest on mine. The day of that outing, I find in my diary:
Undeniable affection toward us from coachmen, chambermaids, and farmhands. Doubtless they can tell we love each other. The professionalism demonstrated by the staff in this little hotel … What I find exquisite is that with her I feel mere contempt for everything that is not her, and she for everything that is not me. She does something quite delectable with her face to express abandon and delight. There is a touch of melancholy in it, as if she wanted to capture the moment and keep it in her mind’s eye
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    Oh! I still so love the Odile of those weeks in Florence! She was so beautiful that I sometimes doubted she was real. I would turn to her and say, “I shall try to last five minutes without looking at you.” I never managed to resist longer than thirty seconds. There was extraordinary poetry in everything she said. Although she was very cheerful, there was occasionally something darker like the note of a cello in her words, a melancholy discordthat promptly filled the air with a strange and tragic threat. What was the phrase she would quote then? “Fatally condemned.” Wait, yes: “Under the influence of Mars, fatally condemned, oh girl with the golden hair, beware.” In what puerile novel, what melodrama had she read or heard those words? I forget. The first time she gave me her lips, at dusk in a warm furtive olive grove, she looked at me with the sweetest air of sadness: “My darling, do you remember Juliet’s words? … ‘I am too fond, and therefore thou mayst think my behavior light.’ ”
    It is a pleasure remembering our love in those days; it was a beautiful emotion, equally strong in Odile as it was in me. But with Odile, emotions were almost always restrained by pride. She explained later that first the convent and then life with her mother whom she did not love had constrained her to “closing herself” like this. When this hidden fire appeared, it was as brief violent flames that warmed my heart all the more keenly because I knew they were involuntary. There is a comparison to be drawn with women’s clothing: some fashions entirely hide women’s bodies from men’s eyes, thereby contriving to give more impact when a dress subtly skims the figure; similarly, a modesthold on emotions veiling the usual signs of passion brings out all the value and grace of imperceptible nuances in the choice of words. The day my father finally recalled me to Paris with a fairly disgruntled telegram, I had to announce the fact to Odile at the Guardis’ house because she had arrived there before me. Other guests, who were quite indifferent to my leaving, went back to a rather unlikely conversation about Germany and Morocco.
    “That was interesting, what Guardi was saying,” I said to Odile on our way out.
    “I heard only one thing, that you were leaving,” she replied, almost in despair.
    * Literally “Pink Library,” this collection of books, which began publishing in 1856, was deemed suitable for girls.

. V .
    I left Florence an engaged man. I needed to discuss my plans with my parents, and I contemplated this not without anxiety. For the Marcenats, marriage had always been seen to concern the clan as a whole. My uncles would