Danielle

She moved into his house and life wavered between ecstasy and agony for three years. He loved her most ardently, but was unable in this passionate phase to know an young girl's longing to pack the rainbow in a crate. Though she found Edmond's hyper-romanticism, his moods, and his straggling lifestyle lifting up her young spirit to the clouds, she was did not quite comprehend the emotional intensity of such a disposition. She was twenty, beautiful, lively, amorous, and vaguely romantic like most women are at that age, and had plunged headlong into a liaison with a man for whom love was a pursuit, a torment, and a search for permanent ecstasy. But, like many women whose responses to being the object of overpowering emotions hover irresolutely between relish and hesitation, she couldn't see that life was nought if it wasn't zest and eloquence; that men who couldn't offer rainbows duped the souls of their women; and that rainbows couldn’t indeed be packed in a crate.

One day, lying with her hand pillowed in his shoulder, she paused to reflect on the three cloistered years spent with him and felt diminished in her own eyes. She longed to be free, to escape from what had obsessed her, to break the spell that bound her to him. As time passed, she looked for an autonomous state of being, took up a job at the Musee Archeologique and digressed into social life away from Edmond's immediate sphere.

When she didn't come home one night, he wrote to her saying, "Please return to me, Daniel, I implore you! What woman could ever take your place in my life? I was dead and you gave me life in its most perfect form. I have loved you with the most complete self-effacement, and what you have done isn't kind."

But Daniel never returned. She joined archaeology at the Sorbonne a year later, and disappeared into the world of Paris. Three years later she was married to an American millionaire, eighteen years older than her, who had some business interest in France. Materially speaking, she had everything. But soon after a daughter was born a year after the marriage, passions became routine. The American immersed himself in his profession, and business took him frequently on travels round the world. In any case, he wasn't an epitome of health and romanticism and was too preoccupied with his business concerns to respond zestfully to his wife's emotional demands.

She often thought of Edmond and the intensity of his love, and the remembrance was like a powerful storm that besieged her violently when she was lonesome. It was not long before she had to strain every nerve to maintain her equanimity as a wife and mother.

On her thirtieth birthday, her husband bought a gift hamper at Lafayette and a new rose bush appropriately called Daniel from a nearby garden store. But it was only two months later, when the roses bloomed on the new bush, and the daughter came running with a freshly plucked bloom in her hand and exclaimed, "It smells of you, mother", that memories of an old enchantment tore her heart away from her moorings, over the rim of the world into a drear desolation, as if somebody had run like a thorn into the wilderness of her being.

She called the Rose Society and they told her that the new rose had been developed by Edmond Loreille, an amateur botanist from the south. She tried calling him but there was no telephone traceable to that name. She made enquiries from old friends at Antibe and Nice and it took her many weeks before she learnt that Edmond had drowned during a fishing trip in the Mediterranean some months ago.