As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a miserable life.

He made another effort to quicken the dead.

Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts.

The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end.

After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him.