She expressed her desire not to leave Cormeilles--to pass the winter in solitude; the human face terrified her.

M.Moriaz tried to represent to her that she was unreasonable.
"Will you wear eternal mourning for a stranger ?" he asked; "for, in reality, the man that you loved you never saw.

Ah! _mon Dieu_, you deceived, you deluded yourself.

Is there, I will not say a single woman, but a single member of the Institute, who has not once been grossly imposed on?
It is through the means of failures in experiments that science progresses." And he rose to still higher considerations; he endeavoured to prove to her that, if it is bad to have erred, an excessive fear of erring is a still worse evil, because it is better to lose one's way than not to walk at all.
When he had finished his harangue, she said, shaking her head, "I have no longer faith in any one." "What! not even in the brave fellow to whom you owe the recovery of your portrait and your letters ?" "Of whom do you speak ?" she exclaimed.
Then he declared to her how M.Langis had effected the descent into the den, without telling her what had resulted therefrom.
"Ah! that was kind, very kind," she said.

"I never doubted that Camille was a true friend." "A friend?
Are you very sure that it is only friendship that he feels for you ?" Whereupon M.Moriaz told her all the rest.