When I reached home I began to cry like a child. There is no man to whom
a woman has not been unfaithful, once at least, and who will not know
what I suffered.

I said to myself, under the weight of these feverish resolutions which
one always feels as if one had the force to carry out, that I must break
with my amour at once, and I waited impatiently for daylight in order
to set out forthwith to rejoin my father and my sister, of whose love at
least I was certain, and certain that that love would never be betrayed.

However, I did not wish to go away without letting Marguerite know why
I went. Only a man who really cares no more for his mistress leaves her
without writing to her. I made and remade twenty letters in my head. I
had had to do with a woman like all other women of the kind. I had been
poetizing too much. She had treated me like a school-boy, she had used
in deceiving me a trick which was insultingly simple. My self-esteem
got the upper hand. I must leave this woman without giving her the
satisfaction of knowing that she had made me suffer, and this is what I
wrote to her in my most elegant handwriting and with tears of rage and
sorrow in my eyes: "MY DEAR MARGUERITE: I hope that your indisposition yesterday was not
serious. I came, at eleven at night, to ask after you, and was told
that you had not come in. M. de G. was more fortunate, for he presented
himself shortly afterward, and at four in the morning he had not left.