Love was depicted in it, if not by a
master-hand, at any rate by a man who seemed to give his own
impressions; and truth, even if unskilled, could not fail to touch a
virgin soul. Here lay the secret of Rosalie's terrible agitation, of
her fever and her tears; she was jealous of Francesca Colonna.
She never for an instant doubted the sincerity of this poetical
flight; Albert had taken pleasure in telling the story of his passion,
while changing the names of persons and perhaps of places. Rosalie was
possessed by infernal curiosity. What woman but would, like her, have
wanted to know her rival's name--for she too loved! As she read these
pages, to her really contagious, she had said solemnly to herself, "I
love him!"--She loved Albert, and felt in her heart a gnawing desire
to fight for him, to snatch him from this unknown rival. She reflected
that she knew nothing of music, and that she was not beautiful.
"He will never love me!" thought she.
This conclusion aggravated her anxiety to know whether she might not
be mistaken, whether Albert really loved an Italian Princess, and was
loved by her. In the course of this fateful night, the power of swift
decision, which had characterized the famous Watteville, was fully
developed in his descendant. She devised those whimsical schemes,
round which hovers the imagination of most young girls when, in the
solitude to which some injudicious mothers confine them, they are
roused by some tremendous event which the system of repression to
which they are subjected could neither foresee nor prevent.
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