The Lily of the Valley

The night a star in your sky turns into a person.

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me. My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy. Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love. Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room; they had not made the slightest impression on me. Is there an hour, a conjunction of the stars, a combination of fitting circumstances, a particular woman above all other women, which seal a passion as exclusive at the age when passion includes the whole female sex?

The morning you realise the world is smaller than your appetite for it.

This is the outcome of the finest sentiments, the greatest dramas of youth. We all set forth one fine morning, as I had started from Tours for Clochegourde, annexing the world, our heart craving for love; then, when our treasure has been through the crucible, when we have mixed with men, and known events, it all seems unaccountably small, we find so little gold among the ashes. Such is life—life in its reality!—a great deal of aspiration, a small result.

Every family has a wound it has agreed not to mention.

Though families bury duly their terrible quarrels, look into their life; you will find in almost every house some wide incurable wounds blighting natural feeling; or some genuine and pathetic passion which affinity of character makes eternal, and which gives an added shock to the hand of death, leaving a dark and ineradicable bruise; or again, simmering hatred, slowly petrifying the heart, and freezing up all tears at the moment of eternal parting.