His love for Laure d'Aumenier was the great passion of his life.

Yet even his love for the woman, or hers for him, if she had returned his devotion with equal intensity and ardor, would not avail to persuade him to give up that battered standard.
Even if she had loved him! Ah, what had she said in that moment of madness in her room that night?
It was a moment of madness, of course, nothing else.

Marteau put it out of his mind, or strove to.

It could not be.

Indeed, now that he was about to die, he would even admit that it should not be.