He has had love affairs, but he has never been truly in love before. It seems to him as if, when she looks at him, there is a remoteness in her gaze which he has never felt before in human eye. It reminds him of the gleam of the stars, which has traversed millions of miles of space. He has a hesitation in approaching her which makes the distance between them seem impassable. When he at last succeeds in making her acquaintance, it is the name and the position of a brother which she gives him, and with this he is contented and happy. No sooner have they found one another than he feels as if he were relieved from a heavy burden--the burden of his heart. As soon as he gives it away he learns what life in all its fulness is. He feels as if he were floating in the purest ether; his joy is infinite and luminous as the air of heaven. During the first hours which he spends with her he loses all perception of time; he is certain that a thousand years spent thus would to him be so many seconds. He does not feel like a human being, but like a living hymn of praise.
And this ecstatic mood lasts as long as he breathes the same air with her. They are happy together during the beautiful summer days, and prolong their summer into autumn: "Our summer was in ourselves."
We feel that this description of the bliss of young love is a description of something that really has existed. The young couple are living not far from the place where Rousseau, as a youth, loved Madame de Warens. Raphael is rather younger than Julie--he is twenty-four, she twenty-eight; this gives their relation a certain resemblance to that between Rousseau and his protectress; but the emotions of Raphael and Julie are as incorporeal and romantic as those of the other couple were substantially human.
And not only the happiness produced by the presence of the loved one, but the pain of separation, the longing for letters, the fever of expectation when the time of meeting draws near, and the agonies of parting are described, with many admirable realistic touches, in a manner worthy of a great writer.
Raphael lives in the country, Julie in Paris. When he takes a walk, his steps involuntarily turn towards the north, to diminish the distance which separates him from her. His day contains only one happy hour, that which brings the postman with her letter. As soon as he hears the postman's step he is at the window; he meets him at the street door, hides the letter in his pocket, and hastens with trembling knees to his room, where he locks himself in to read it in privacy. Later in the story, when Raphael is in Paris, we have the admirable description of his wanderings on the winter evenings back and forwards across one of the Seine bridges, waiting for the moment when the lamp in her window shall show him that her guests have taken their departure, and that he is certain to find her alone. Note the blind beggar on the bridge, into whose tin cup he never forgets to throw his mite; the striking of the hour and the half-hour by the church clocks; and another delicate little touch--Raphael's hearing gradually becomes so acute that he distinguishes the separate chime of each clock in the chorus.