The real truth was this.
Rodolphe then seriously believed he had done with all things of youth and love; he insolently chanted a _De profundis_ over his heart, which he thought dead when it was only silent, yet still ready to awake, still accessible to joy, and more susceptible than ever to all the sweet pangs that he no longer hoped for, and that were now driving him to despair.
You would have it, Rodolphe, and we shall not pity you, for the disease from which you are suffering is one of those we long for most, above all when we know that we are cured of it forever.
Rodolphe then met Mimi, whom he had formerly known when she was the mistress of one of his friends; and he made her his own.

There was at first a great outcry amongst Rodolphe's friends when they learned of this union, but as Mademoiselle Mimi was very taking, not at all prudish, and could stand tobacco smoke and literary conversations without a headache, they became accustomed to her and treated her as a comrade.

Mimi was a charming girl, and especially adapted for both the plastic and poetical sympathies of Rodolphe.

She was twenty two years of age, small, delicate, and arch.

Her face seemed the first sketch of an aristocratic countenance, but her features, extremely fine in outline, and as it were, softly lit up by the light of her clear blue eyes, wore, at certain moments of weariness or ill-humor, an expression of almost savage brutality, in which a physiologist would perhaps have recognized the indication of profound egotism or great insensibility.