[not this edition but one printed in 1908]
Written at the same time as Graziella -- I'm not actually certain whether this was also part of Les Confidences or not -- this short episode was loosely based on Lamartine's relationship with Julie Charles. The book is probably the purest example of early Romanticism in its most obnoxious form (even worse than Graziella and his poetry), and has all the stereotypes that make me dislike that style of literature. A young man visits a friend, who conveniently dies the next day after giving him the manuscript of his relationship with Julie. Naturally, we know from the beginning that she is going to die; of course they fall in love and spend the next hundred or so pages in passionately obsessed conversations about love, death, and God. We are reassured from the beginning that nothing interesting will happen, as they vow not to profane their ethereal love with anything coarse or material (read: no sex), and in fact they never even kiss, just occasionally hold hands. And she faints every once in a while. She is also married, but not to worry: her elderly scientist husband (the real Julie was married to the Charles of Charles' law in physics) considers himself her surrogate father -- naturally, she was raised in an orphanage -- and also does not have marital relations with her. He's also dying throughout the book, and the young man has a friend whose wife has just died young, and a boy's dog dies, and a couple of birds die, and the whole thing is full of pathos. Meanwhile, the young man's mother is selling off her land and personal possessions to support him, because he would never actually work at anything except writing poems which he burns when they're turned down by a publisher. The climax of the book comes just before they are separated for the last time, when she suddenly rejects the "rational" deistic religion of her teachers and husband and exclaims "Yes, there is a God" which she knows because she's in love; and they then conclude that they aren't in love with each other but in love with God through each other.