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black Percheron horse snapped the shafts of his cart after slipping under the weight of a load of wood.
    She disappeared for several months after that. It was said she had fallen ill and her parents had sent her to the countryside to recover. When she came back she was no longer a child. I remember very well my first sighting of her new appearance.
    It was a day in April when the sky hesitated between cloud and sun. I no longer remember what dream I was chasing; in any case, I was lost in thought and hardly looked around. Guillaume was with me, and we were slowly walking somewhere. As usual, he was talking and I wasn’t listening. He did not immediately notice that I had stopped.
    We were on our way up from the Place Saint-Pierre and she was crossing the street slightly farther up. Behind her, the freshly painted wall of a house under construction sparkled with whitewash against a patch of sunlight. She was wearing a black houppelande with a hood against her neck. Her blonde hair curled rebelliously against the chignon that was supposed to keep it in place, and it danced in the sunlight. She turned her head to us and stopped for a moment. The features of the child had yielded to the pressure of an inner strength that had molded her forehead and cheeks and infused her lips with blood, enlarging her eyes around blue irises that I had never seen before, because her lids were always lowered.
    I immediately thought of her name. Not her first name, which I had forgotten, and which I would later repeat so often and cherish so much. It was her family name that came back to me in a flash: Léodepart. This strange name was Flemish. It is, apparently, a distortion of Lollepop. We spoke about it one day at table with my father. In that instant, Léodepart betrayed all at once its relation with “leopard.” The two words, so similar, had burst into my life with the same force, and perhaps the same significance. They were linked to beauty, to light, to a certain brilliance of the sun upon a blonde creature, to dreams of elsewhere. The leopard had gone back into its bag, leaving behind this stuff of dreams, and a name, Arabia. Mademoiselle de Léodepart, although forged from a different essence, was clearly from the same world as the leopard.
    Her Christian name was Macé. I heard it from Guillaume, and that was my first step toward her that day. The weeks that followed were filled entirely with my desire to get closer to her. I led this campaign with the same apparent calm I had displayed during our escapade, but deep inside I was devoured by a far greater fear. By dint of cunning and false pretexts, I managed several times to cross her path. I was determined to speak to her, but every time I felt the words catch in my throat. She walked by without looking at me. One morning, however, I had the extraordinary impression that she had smiled at me. On the days that followed, she was as cold and absent as ever.
    I was desperate at the thought of everything that separated our two families. Previously I had ignored any differences between my father’s condition and that of other burghers and their families, but now I could not help but exaggerate them. Our house, at the corner of two streets, seemed narrow and ridiculous, whereas Macé’s house seemed scarcely less vast and luxurious than the Duke’s palace. I wore myself out trying to come up with a trick to get myself invited to her house. Nothing worked. Macé’s brothers and sisters were much older and I did not know them. We had no friends in common. Our parents did not visit each other. There were times when we were together at a service at the Cathedral, when the bells rang out a holy day. Alas, we were always far apart.
    These material obstacles were driving me mad. I began to envision the most desperate solutions. I observed the locks on the Léodeparts’ house, and the number and habits of their servants. I imagined stealing into the