mply playing a childish game. It was said that their talk of love was silly and ludicrous.Adele wanted to find out what was the meaning of his silent admiration. She said: "I am sure you have secrets. Have you not one secret, greater than all?" When Victor admitted to possession of this secret, Adele gleefully cried out, "Just like me! Well, come now, tell me your greatest secret, and I will tell you mine." My greatest secret,” Victor replied, "is that I love you." Adele echoed back, "And my great secret is that I love you" (Maurois, 10).Despite the difficulties that their marriage would endure, Victor and Adele remained remarkably close. Until the time of Adele’s death all correspondence between the two were addressed to “My dear, great friend.” If this is not a term of everlasting true love of some form, then such a love does not exist. The pain that Victor felt in the absence of Adele during the first year of their marriage was true and real. He expressed this pain in a letter to Adele.It seems to me that from now on we must show in public an extreme reserve towards one another: it is only after much struggling that I have brought myself to the point of advising you to be cold to me, your husband, your Victor, the man who would give everything to spare you a moment’s pain. I must needs condemn myself never to sit beside you, and, Oh! My dear love, I beg you to have pity on my wretched jealousy, and avoid all other men as you must avoid me. I will never approach you; but let me, at least, hove the consolation of never seeing others enjoy the happiness which only on your account I have renounced. Stay with your mother: sit with other women. You can have no idea, my Adele, how much I love you. If I so much as see another man draw near you, I tremble with longing and impatience: my muscles grow tense, my breast swells, it is all that I can so to keep a hold upon myself . . ...
