Chapter 3

I am the titular lover of the pink lady; that is almost a profession,
an office, and it gives a man a firm footing in society. I no longer
look like a scholar seeking a mistress among a parcel of grandmothers
and afraid to sing a love-song to a woman unless she's a hundred
years old; I notice, since my installation, that I receive much more
consideration, that all the women talk to me with jealous coquetry and
go out of their way to smile on me.--The men, on the other hand, are
colder, and in the few words we exchange there is a touch of hostility
and constraint; they feel that they have in me an enemy already
formidable, who may become much more so.--I have heard that many of
them had bitterly criticised my way of carrying myself and said that my
style of dress was too effeminate; that my hair was curled and anointed
with more care than beseemed me; that that fact, taken in connection
with my beardless face, gave me a most absurd girlish appearance; that
I affected rich materials that smelt of the stage, and that I looked
more like an actor than a man: a parcel of trite, sneering remarks,
intended to justify themselves in being dirty and wearing wretched,
ill-fitting clothes. But all this serves only to make me the whiter,
and all the ladies consider that my hair is the finest in the world,
and that the niceties of my toilet are in the best taste, and they
seem strongly disposed to make up to me for all that I spend for
their benefit, for they are not fools enough to believe that all that
elegance has no other aim than my own private embellishment.

The lady of the house seemed at first a little offended at my choice,
which she thought must inevitably fall upon herself, and for some days
she was decidedly sour--to her rival only, for there was no change in
her manner to me--her spleen manifesting itself in divers little "My
dears," uttered in that dry, abrupt tone that women alone can master,
and in certain uncomplimentary remarks concerning her costume, made
in as loud a voice as possible, such as: "Your hair is done too high
and not at all to correspond with your face," or: "Your waist bags
under the arms; who in the world made that dress?" or: "You have black
rings under your eyes; it seems to me you are much changed;" and a
thousand other trivial observations to which the other did not fail to
retort with all desirable malignity when opportunity offered; and if
the opportunity was too slow in offering she made one for her own use
and returned, with interest, what she had received. But soon, another
object having distracted the attention of the slighted princess, the
little war of words ceased and everything resumed its usual order.

I said baldly that I was the pink lady's titular lover; that is not
enough for so accurate a man as you are. You will undoubtedly ask
me what her name is: as for that, I shall not tell you; but, if you
choose, to shorten the story and in memory of the color of the dress in
which I first saw her, we will call her Rosette; it's a pretty name; my
little dog has the same name.

You would like to know from point to point, for you love exactness in
all things, the story of our love-affairs with this fair Bradamante,
and by what successive steps I passed from the general to the
particular and from the condition of simple spectator to that of actor;
how, after being one of the audience, I became the lover. I will
gratify your desire with the very greatest pleasure. There is nothing
unpleasant in our romance; it is all rose-colored, and no tears are
shed except tears of pleasure; you will find no long descriptions or
repetitions, and everything moves on toward the end with the haste
and speed so urgently recommended by Horace;--it is a genuine French
romance.--Do not imagine, however, that I carried the citadel at the
first assault. The princess, although very humane to her subjects, is
not as lavish of her favors at first, as you might think; she knows
their value too well not to make you purchase them; she also knows
too well how a judicious delay sharpens the appetite and what relish
a semi-resistance adds to the pleasure, to abandon herself to you at
first, however keen the inclination you have aroused in her.

To tell the whole story at length, I must go back a little. I gave you
a very circumstantial account of our first interview. I had one or two,
perhaps three others in the same house, and then she invited me to call
on her; I did not make her repeat the invitation, as you can believe;
I went there at discreet intervals at first, then a little more
frequently, then still more so, and finally whenever the fancy seized
me, and I must confess that it seized me at least three or four times a
day.--The lady, after we had been parted a few hours, always received
me as if I had just returned from the East Indies; which fact touched
me as much as anything could and impelled me to show my gratitude in a
marked manner by the most gallant and tenderest words you can imagine,
to which she replied as best she could.

Rosette--as we have agreed to call her that--is a very bright woman and
has a most admirable appreciation of man; although she postponed the
end of the chapter for some time, I did not once lose my temper with
her: which is really marvellous, for you know how I fly into a passion
when I don't get what I want on the instant, and when a woman goes
beyond the time I have mentally allowed her in which to surrender.--I
have no idea how she did it at the first interview; she gave me to
understand that I should have her, and I was surer of her than if I had
had her written promise signed by her hand. You will say perhaps that
her bold and free-and-easy manners left the field free to rash hopes.
I do not think that that is the real motive: I have seen some women
whose prodigious freedom of manner excluded the last vestige of doubt,
who did not produce that effect upon me, and in whose presence I was
conscious of a timidity and uneasiness that were, to say the least,
misplaced.

The result is, generally speaking, that I am less amiable with the
woman I long to possess than with those who are indifferent to me;
it is because of the excitement of waiting for an opportunity and my
uncertainty as to the success of my project; that makes me gloomy and
casts me into a fit of musing which takes away much of my power of
pleasing and my presence of mind. When I see the hours I had set aside
for another purpose passing one by one, I am filled with anger in spite
of myself, and I cannot keep from saying very sharp, harsh things,
which sometimes go as far as brutality and put my affair back a hundred
leagues.

With Rosette I had no such feeling; never, even at the moment when she
resisted me most stubbornly, did I have the idea that she wanted to
escape from my love. I calmly allowed her to display all her little
coquetries, and I endured in patience the overlong delays to which it
pleased her to subject my ardor; there was something smiling in her
harshness that consoled you for it as much as possible, and in her most
Hyrcanian cruelties you could distinguish a background of humanity that
made it impossible for you to have any very serious fear.--Virtuous
women, even when they are not really virtuous at all, have a crabbed,
disdainful way which is perfectly unendurable to me. They have the
air of being always ready to ring and order their footmen to put you
out; and it seems to me, really, that a man who takes the trouble to
pay court to a woman--and it isn't always as agreeable as you may
think--doesn't deserve to be looked at in that way.

Dear Rosette has no such glances as that, not she; and I assure you
that she doesn't lose anything by it; she is the only woman with whom
I have ever been myself, and I am conceited enough to say that I have
never been so agreeable. My wit has displayed itself freely; and, by
the skill and fire of her retorts, she has led me to discover more than
I had any idea that I possessed, and more perhaps than I really do
possess.--To be sure, I haven't done much in the way of lyrics--that
is hardly possible with her; it is not that she has no poetic side,
notwithstanding what De C---- said of her; but she is so full of life
and strength and movement, she seems to be so well placed in her
present surroundings, that one has no desire to leave them for a flight
among the clouds. She fills one's real life so pleasantly and makes of
it something so entertaining to herself and others, that reverie has
nothing better to offer you.

A miraculous thing! I have known her nearly two months, and in those
two months the only times I have been bored have been when I was not
with her. You will agree that she can be no inferior woman to produce
such a result, for women usually produce exactly the opposite effect on
me and are much more agreeable to me at a distance than near at hand.

Rosette has the best disposition in the world, with men I mean, for
with women she's as wicked as a devil; she is bright, lively, alert,
ready for anything, very original in her way of speaking, and has
always some charming nonsense to tell you that you don't expect; she
is a delightful companion, a jolly comrade with whom you sleep, rather
than a mistress; and if I were a few years older and had fewer romantic
ideas, I should be perfectly satisfied, indeed I should deem myself
the most fortunate mortal on earth. But--but--that conjunction implies
nothing good, and unfortunately that little devil of a restrictive word
is the one most frequently employed in all human tongues;--but I am an
imbecile, an idiot, a downright booby, never content with anything and
always hunting mares' nests; and, instead of being altogether happy, I
am only half so;--half, that is a good deal for this world, and yet I
find it not enough.

In the eyes of the world I have a mistress whom several desire and envy
me, and whom no one would disdain. My desire is gratified, therefore,
in appearance, and I no longer have the right to pick a quarrel with
fate. However, it seems to me that I have no mistress; I can convince
myself that I have by arguing it out, but I do not feel it, and if
anybody should ask me unexpectedly if I had one, I think I should
answer no.--However, the possession of a woman who has beauty, youth,
and wit, constitutes what, in all times and in all countries, has
been and still is called having a mistress, and I think there is no
other way. That doesn't prevent my having the strangest doubts in that
connection, and it has gone so far that if several people should unite
to convince me that I am not Rosette's favored lover, I should end by
believing them in the face of the palpable evidence to the contrary.

Do not think from what I say that I do not love her or that she is
displeasing to me in any way; on the contrary, I am very fond of her
and I see in her what everybody else would see in her: a pretty,
alluring creature. I simply do not feel that I possess her, that is
all. And yet no woman ever gave me so much pleasure, and if I have ever
known bliss, it has been in her arms.--A single one of her kisses, the
most chaste of her caresses makes me shiver to the soles of my feet
and sends all my blood back to my heart. Explain it all if you can.
The facts, however, are as I tell them to you. But the human heart is
full of such absurdities; and if we were obliged to reconcile all the
contradictions it exhibits, we should have a heavy task on our hands.

How does it happen? Verily, I have no idea.

I see her all day, and all night too, if I choose. I bestow as many
caresses on her as I please; I have her naked or dressed, in town or
in the country. Her good humor is inexhaustible, and she enters heart
and soul into my whims however eccentric they may be; one evening the
fancy seized me to possess her in the middle of the salon, with all the
candles lighted, the fire blazing on the hearth, the chairs arranged
in a circle as if for a grand evening reception, she, in a _toilette
de bal_ with her bouquet and her fan, all her diamonds on her fingers
and her neck, feathers in her hair--the most magnificent costume
imaginable--and I dressed like a bear; she consented.--When everything
was ready, the servants were greatly surprised to receive orders to
close the doors and admit no one; they acted as if they had not the
slightest comprehension of what it all meant, and went away with a
dazed look that made us laugh heartily. They certainly thought that
their mistress was stark mad; but what they thought or did not think
mattered little to us.

That was the most burlesque evening of my whole life. Can you imagine
the appearance I must have presented with my hat and feather under my
paw, rings on every claw, a little silver-hilted sword and a sky-blue
ribbon on its hilt? I approached the fair one, and, having made her
a most graceful reverence, sat down beside her and besieged her in
due form. The flattering madrigals, the exaggerated compliments I
addressed to her, all the jargon suited to the occasion assumed a
strange significance in passing through my bear's muzzle; for I had
a superb head of painted cardboard which I was soon obliged to throw
under the table, my deity was so adorable that evening, and I longed
so to kiss her hand and something better than her hand. The skin soon
followed the head; for not being accustomed to play the bear, I was
stifled in it, more so than was necessary. Thereupon the ball-dress
had a fine time as you can imagine; the feathers fell like snow around
my beauty, the shoulders soon came out of the sleeves, the bosom from
the corset, the feet from the shoes, the legs from the stockings; the
unstrung necklaces rolled on the floor, and I believe that fresher
dress was never more pitilessly rumpled and torn; the dress was of
silver gauze and the lining of white satin. Rosette displayed on that
occasion a heroism altogether unusual to her sex, which gave me a most
exalted opinion of her. She looked on at the sack of her costume like
an uninterested witness, and did not for a single instant show the
slightest regret for her dress and her lace; on the contrary, she was
wildly gay, and assisted with her own hands in tearing and breaking
anything that wouldn't untie or unclasp quickly enough to suit my
taste and hers.--Doesn't this strike you as worthy to be handed down
in history beside the most brilliant deeds of the heroes of antiquity?
The greatest proof of love a woman can give her lover is to refrain
from saying to him: "Take care and not rumple me or spot my dress,"
especially if the dress be new.--A new dress is a greater source
of security to a husband than is commonly supposed. It must be that
Rosette adores me or else she is blessed with a philosophy superior to
that of Epictetus.

Nevertheless I think that I paid Rosette the full value of her dress
and more, in coin which is none the less esteemed and valued because it
does not pass current with tradesmen. Such unexampled heroism surely
deserved such a recompense. However, like the generous creature she
is, she repaid what I gave her. I had a wild, almost convulsive sort
of pleasure, such as I did not believe myself capable of enjoying. The
resounding kisses mingled with bursts of laughter, the shuddering,
impatient caresses, all the piquant, tantalizing sensations, the
pleasure imperfectly enjoyed because of the costume and the situation,
but a hundred times keener than if there had been no obstacles,
produced such an effect on my nerves that I was seized with paroxysms
which I had some difficulty in overcoming.--You cannot conceive the
proud, affectionate way in which Rosette gazed at me as she tried to
soothe me, and the joyful yet anxious manner with which she lavished
attentions upon me: her face glowed with the pleasure that she felt
in producing such an effect upon me, while her eyes, swimming in
sweet tears, bore witness to her alarm at my apparent illness and the
interest she took in my health.--She had never seemed so beautiful to
me as at that moment. There was something so maternal and so chaste
in her glance that I entirely forgot the more than anacreontic scene
that had just taken place, and threw myself on my knees at her feet,
asking permission to kiss her hand; which permission she granted with
extraordinary dignity and gravity.

That woman certainly isn't as depraved as De C---- claims and as she
has often seemed to me to be; her corruption is in her mind and not in
her heart.

I have cited this scene from among twenty others: it seems to me that
after such an experience one can, without overweening conceit, believe
himself a woman's lover.--And yet I have not that feeling.--I had no
sooner returned home than that thought took possession of me and began
to work upon me as usual.--I remembered perfectly all that I had said
and heard, all that I had done and seen. The slightest gestures, the
most insignificant attitudes, all the most trivial details stood out
clearly in my memory: I remembered everything, even to the slightest
inflections of the voice, the most indescribable shades of enjoyment;
but it did not seem to me that all those things had happened to me
rather than to some one else. I was not sure that it was not all
an illusion, a phantasmagoria, a dream, or that I had not read it
somewhere or other, or even that it was not a story invented by myself
as I had invented many others. I dreaded being the dupe of my own
credulity or the plaything of some deception; and notwithstanding the
evidence of my weariness and the material proofs that I had not slept
at home, I could easily have believed that I had gone to bed at my
usual hour and slept till morning.

I am very unfortunate in my inability to acquire the moral certainty
of something of which I am physically certain. In ordinary cases the
contrary is the case and the fact proves the idea. I would like well to
prove the fact by the idea; I cannot do it; although it is a strange
thing, it is so. It rests with myself, to a certain extent, to have a
mistress; but I cannot force myself to believe that I have one, even
though that is the fact. If I have not the necessary faith in me, even
for a thing so palpable as that, it is just as impossible for me to
believe in so simple a fact as for another to believe in the Trinity.
Faith is not to be acquired, it is a pure gift, a special grace from
Heaven.

No one ever longed as I do to live the life of others and to assimilate
another nature to my own; no one ever had less success. Whatever I may
do, other men are little more than phantoms to me and I do not feel
their existence; but it is not the desire to understand their lives and
share in them that I lack. It is the power or the want of real sympathy
with anything on earth. The existence or non-existence of a person or
thing does not interest me enough to affect me in a perceptible and
convincing way. The sight of a man or a woman who appears before me
in flesh and blood leaves on my mind no more definite trace than the
fanciful vision of a dream: a pale world of shadows and of apparitions,
false or true, hovers about me, murmuring low, and in the midst of
them I feel as utterly alone as possible, for not one of them has any
effect upon me for good or evil, and they seem to me to be of a nature
altogether different from mine. If I speak to them and they make what
seems a sensible reply, I am as surprised as if my dog or my cat should
suddenly open his mouth and take part in the conversation: the sound
of their voices always astonishes me and I could easily believe that
they are only fleeting apparitions and I the mirror in which they are
reflected. Inferior or superior, I certainly am not of their kind.
There are moments when I recognize none but God above me, and others
when I deem myself hardly the equal of the earthworm under its stone or
the mollusk on its sand-bank; but whatever my frame of mind, exalted or
humble, I have never been able to persuade myself that men were really
my fellows. When any one calls me _monsieur_, or, in speaking of me,
refers to me as _that man_, it always seems strange to me. My very name
seems to me but an empty one and not my real name; and yet, no matter
how low it may be uttered, amid the loudest noise, I turn suddenly with
a convulsive and peevish eagerness which I have never been able to
explain.--Is it the dread of finding in the man who knows my name, and
to whom I am no longer simply one of the common herd, an antagonist or
an enemy?

It is when I have been living with a woman that I feel most strongly
how utterly my nature repels every sort of alliance and mixture. I am
like a drop of oil in a glass of water. No matter how much you turn it
and shake it, the oil will never mix with the water; it will separate
into a hundred thousand little globules which will unite again and
rise to the surface the instant it becomes calm: the drop of oil and
the glass of water epitomize my history. Even lust--that diamond chain
that binds all human beings together, that consuming fire that melts
the stone and metal of the heart and causes them to fall in tears as
material fire melts iron and granite--all powerful as it is, has never
been able to subdue or move me. And yet my senses are very sharp; but
my heart is a hostile sister to my body, and the ill-mated couple, like
every possible couple, lawfully or unlawfully united, lives in a state
of constant warfare.--A woman's arms, the strongest of all earthly
bonds, so it is said, are to me very weak fetters, and I have never
been farther from my mistress than when she was straining me to her
heart.--I was stifled, that's the whole story.

How many times have I been angry with myself! What superhuman efforts
have I made to be different! How I have exhorted myself to be
affectionate, lover-like, passionate! how often I have taken my heart
by the hair and dragged it to my lips in the middle of a kiss! Whatever
I do, it always recoils, wiping the kiss away, as soon as I release my
hold. What torture for that poor heart to look on at the orgies of my
body and to be constantly compelled to sit through banquets at which it
has nothing to eat!

It was when I was with Rosette that I determined, once for all, to
ascertain if I am not hopelessly unsociable, and if I can take enough
interest in another person's existence to believe in it. I exhausted
the whole category of experiments, and I have not succeeded in solving
my doubts to any great extent. With her my pleasure is so keen that my
heart often finds itself diverted at least, if not touched, a state of
things that impairs the accuracy of observations. After all, I have
discovered that it didn't go below the skin and that my enjoyment
was confined to the epidermis, the heart participating only through
curiosity. I have pleasure because I am young and ardent; but the
pleasures came from myself and not from another. Its source was in
myself rather than in Rosette.

It is of no use for me to struggle, I cannot go out of myself for a
single moment. I am still what I was, that is to say, a very tired,
very tiresome creature, who disgusts me exceedingly. I have failed
utterly to introduce into my brain the idea of another human being,
into my heart, another's emotion, into my body, another's pain or
pleasure. I am a prisoner in myself and all escape is impossible: the
prisoner longs to escape, the walls ask nothing better than to crumble,
and the doors to open before him; but some inexplicable fatality keeps
every stone immovable in its place, every bolt in its groove; it is as
impossible for me to admit any one to my quarters as to go myself to
others; I cannot make or receive calls, and I live in the most absolute
solitude amid the multitude: my bed may not be widowed, but my heart
always is.

Ah! to be unable to increase one's size by a single line, by a single
atom; to be unable to admit others' blood into one's veins; to see
always with one's own eyes, never clearer, never farther, never
otherwise; to hear sounds with the same ears and the same sensation;
to touch with the same fingers; to perceive changing objects with
an unchangeable organ; to be doomed to the same tone of voice, the
repetition of the same sounds, the same phrases, the same words, and
not to be able to fly, to escape one's self, to take refuge in some
corner where no one can follow; to be compelled to keep always to one's
self, to dine and lie alone--to be the same man to twenty different
women; to play, throughout the most complicated situations of the drama
of your life, a part that is forced upon you, whose lines you know
by heart; to think the same things, to have the same dreams:--what
torture, what ennui!

I have longed for the horn of the Tangut brothers, for Fortunatus's
hat, Abaris's bâton, Gygès's ring; I would have sold my soul to
snatch the magic wand from a fairy's hand, but I have never longed so
intensely for anything as to meet on the mountain, like Tiresias the
soothsayer, those serpents who can change the sex of mortals, and what
I most envy in the strange, monstrous gods of the Indies are their
constant incarnations and innumerable transformations.

I began by longing to be another man; then, as I reflected that I
could, by analogy, foresee almost exactly what I should feel and
therefore not experience the change and the surprise I expected, I
concluded that I would prefer to be a woman; that idea always occurred
to me when I had a mistress who was not ugly; for an ugly woman is like
a man to me, and in my moments of enjoyment I would gladly have changed
my rôle, for it is very annoying to know nothing about the effect one
produces and to judge of others' pleasure only by one's own. Such
reflections and many others have often given me, at moments when it
was most inappropriate, a meditative, dreamy air, which has caused me
to be accused most unjustly of coldness and infidelity.

Rosette, who, very luckily, doesn't know all this, believes me to
be the most amorous man on earth; she takes that impotent _frenzy_
for a frenzy of passion, and she does her utmost to humor all the
experimental caprices that pass through my brain.

I have done all that I possibly could to convince myself that she
belongs to me. I have tried to go down into her heart, but I have
always stopped on the first step of the staircase, at her flesh or her
mouth. Despite the intimacy of our corporeal relations, I feel that we
have nothing in common. Never has an idea of the same tenor as mine
spread its wings in that youthful, smiling head; never has that heart,
overflowing with life and fire, whose palpitations cause that firm,
white breast to rise and fall, beaten in unison with my heart. My soul
has never coalesced with hers. Cupid, the god with the hawk's wings,
has not kissed Psyche on her fair ivory brow. No!--that woman is not my
mistress.

If you know all that I have done to compel my heart to share the
love of my body! with what frenzy I have glued my mouth to hers
and wound my arms in her hair, and how tightly I have embraced her
rounded, supple figure. Like Salmacis of old, enamored of the young
Hermaphrodite, I have tried to melt her body and mine together; I have
drunk her breath and her warm tears that bliss forced from the brimming
chalice of her eyes. The more inextricably our bodies were intertwined,
the closer our embrace, the less I loved her. My heart, sitting sadly
by, looked on with a pitying air at that deplorable union to which it
was not bidden, or veiled its face in disgust and wept silently behind
the skirt of its cloak. All this is attributable perhaps to the fact
that I do not really love Rosette, worthy to be loved though she be,
and anxious as I am to love her.

To rid myself of the idea that I was myself, I transported myself to
most unusual surroundings, where it was altogether unlikely that I
should meet myself, and being unable to cast my individuality to the
dogs, I tried to expatriate it so that it would no longer recognize
itself. I have had but moderate success therein, for that devil of
a myself follows me persistently; there is no way of getting rid of
him; I haven't the resource of sending word to him, as I do to other
uncomfortable callers, that I am not at home or that I have gone into
the country.

I have had my mistress in the bath and I have played the Triton as
best I could.--The sea was a huge marble tub. As for the Nereid, what
she showed accused the water, transparent though it was, of not being
sufficiently so for the exquisite beauty of what it concealed.--I have
had her at night, by moonlight, in a gondola with music.

That would be very commonplace at Venice, but here it is anything but
that.--In her carriage, with the horses going at a gallop, amid the
rattling of the wheels, the leaping and jolting, sometimes by the
light of lanterns, sometimes in the densest darkness.--That doesn't
lack a certain stimulating interest and I advise you to try it: but I
forget that you are a venerable patriarch, and that you don't indulge
in such refinements.--I have climbed in at her window when I had the
key to the door in my pocket.--I have made her come to my apartments
in broad daylight, in fact, I have compromised her so thoroughly that
no one--myself excepted, be it understood--now doubts that she is my
mistress.

By reason of all these inventions which, if I were not so young, would
resemble the expedients of a blasé old rake, Rosette adores me far
and away above all others. She sees therein the ardor of a teasing
passion that nothing can restrain, and that is always the same despite
the changes of time and place. She sees therein the constantly renewed
effect of her charms and the triumph of her beauty, and, in truth, I
would that she were right, and it is neither my fault nor hers--I must
be just--that she is not.

The only wrong I have done her consists in being myself. If I told her
that, the child would reply at once that that is my greatest merit in
her eyes; which would be more courteous than sensible.

Once--it was in the beginning of our liaison--I believed that I had
gained my end, for a moment I believed that I loved her--I did love
her.--O my friend, I have never lived except during that moment, and
if it had lasted an hour I should have become a god. We had ridden out
together in the saddle, I on my dear Ferragus, she on a snow-white mare
that looks like a unicorn, her feet are so delicate and her body so
slender. We rode along a broad avenue of elms of prodigious height; the
sun poured down upon us, bright and warm, sifting through the serrated
foliage; ultra-marine patches showed here and there amid the fleecy
clouds, broad bands of pale blue lay along the horizon, changing to a
most delicate apple-green when they encountered the golden rays of the
setting sun. The appearance of the sky was unusual and fascinating; the
breeze wafted to our nostrils an indefinable perfume of wild flowers
delicious beyond words. From time to time a bird rose in front of us
and flew singing along the avenue. The church-bell of an invisible
village softly rang the Angelus, and the silvery notes, which came
but faintly to our ears because of the distance, were inexpressibly
sweet. Our horses were going at a foot pace, and they walked side by
side in such perfect step that neither of them was an inch ahead of the
other.--My heart dilated and my soul overflowed upon my body. I had
never been so happy. I did not speak, nor did Rosette, and yet we never
understood each other so perfectly. We were so close together that my
leg touched her horse's side. I leaned toward her and put my arm about
her waist; she made a similar movement and rested her head against my
shoulder. Our mouths met; O such a chaste, delicious kiss! Our horses
walked on, the reins lying on their necks. I felt Rosette's arms relax
and her body yield more and more. I knew that my own strength was
failing me, and I was near fainting.--Ah! I promise you that at that
moment I cared but little whether I was myself or somebody else. We
rode in that way to the end of the avenue, where the sound of footsteps
caused us abruptly to resume our natural positions; some of our
acquaintances, also in the saddle, rode up and spoke to us. If I had
had my pistols, I believe I should have fired at them.

I glared at them with a fierce, lowering expression that must have
seemed very strange to them. After all, I was wrong to be so angry
with them, for they had unwittingly done me the service of cutting
my pleasure short at the moment when, by its very intensity, it
was certain to become pain or to sink under its violence. The
science of stopping in time is not regarded with all the respect
it deserves.--Sometimes, as you lie with a woman, you put your arm
under her waist: at first it is a most blissful sensation to feel the
pleasant warmth of her body, the soft, velvety flesh of her sides, the
polished ivory of her hips, and to press your hand against her breast
which throbs and quivers. The fair one falls asleep in that voluptuous,
charming posture; the curve of her loins becomes less pronounced,
the agitation of her bosom is calmed, her sides rise and fall with
the freer, more regular respiration of sleep, her muscles relax, her
face is hidden by her hair.--Meanwhile the weight upon your arm grows
heavier, you begin to observe that she is a woman, not a sylph; but you
would not remove your arm for anything on earth. There are many reasons
for that: the first is that it is dangerous to wake a woman with whom
one is lying; one must be prepared to substitute for the blissful dream
she is probably dreaming, a more blissful reality; the second is that,
if you ask her to raise herself so that you can take away your arm,
you tell her indirectly that she is heavy and discommodes you--which
is not polite--or else you give her to understand that you are feeble
and overdone--an extremely humiliating admission for you and likely
to lower you greatly in her mind; the third is that, as you have had
pleasure in that position, you think that if you retain the position
the pleasure may be renewed, wherein you are mistaken. The poor arm is
caught under the mass that crushes it, the blood is checked, the nerves
are distended and numbness pricks you with its countless needles: you
are a sort of Milo of Crotona on a small scale, and the mattress and
the back of your divinity are a sufficiently accurate representation
of the two parts of the tree that have reunited. Day comes at last to
deliver you from your martyrdom and you leap out of that instrument
of torture more eagerly than ever husband descended from the nuptial
scaffold.

That is the history of many passions. It is the history of all
pleasures.

However that may be--despite the interruption or because of the
interruption--never had such a blissful sensation fallen to my lot: I
felt that I was really somebody else. Rosette's soul in its entirety
had entered into my body. My soul had left me and filled her heart
as hers had filled mine. They had met, no doubt, during that long
equestrian kiss, as Rosette dubbed it afterward--to my annoyance by the
way--and had penetrated and mingled as inextricably as the souls of two
mortal creatures can upon a morsel of perishable clay.

Angels surely must kiss like that, and the real paradise is not in
heaven but on the lips of the woman we love.

I have waited in vain for such a moment and have tried unsuccessfully
to lead up to a repetition of it. We have often ridden together
through the avenue of elms at sunset on lovely evenings; the trees had
the same verdure, the birds sang the same song, but to us the sun
seemed dull, the foliage withered: the song of the birds had a harsh,
discordant sound, we were no longer in harmony with it all. We brought
our horses to a walk and we tried the same kiss.--Alas! only our lips
met and it was only the spectre of the former kiss.--The beautiful,
the sublime, the divine, the only real kiss I have given and received
in my whole life had flown away forever. Since that day I have always
had an inexpressibly sad feeling on returning from the forest. Rosette,
light-hearted madcap that she naturally is, cannot avoid the feeling
and her reverie betrays itself by a sweet little pout, which is at
least as attractive as a smile.

Scarcely anything but the fumes of wine and a great blaze of candles
enable me to shake off these fits of depression. We both drink like
men condemned to death, silently and glass after glass, until we have
swallowed the necessary amount; then we begin to laugh and mock most
heartily at what we call our sentimentality.

We laugh--because we cannot weep. Ah! who will succeed in sowing a tear
in my parched eye?

Why did I enjoy that evening so? It would be very hard for me to say.
I was the same man, Rosette the same woman. It was not my first
experience on horse-back, nor hers; we had already watched the sun set
and the spectacle had touched us no more than a picture, which one
admires or not according as the colors are more or less brilliant.
There is more than one avenue of elms and chestnuts in the world, and
that was not the first one we had ridden through; what then caused us
to find such a sovereign fascination there, what metamorphosed the dead
leaves into topazes, the green leaves into emeralds, gilded all those
whirling atoms and changed into pearls all the drops of water scattered
over the greensward, what imparted such sweet melody to the tones of
a bell that was usually discordant and to the twittering of countless
young birds?--There must have been a very penetrating flavor of poesy
in the air, as even our horses seemed to catch the scent of it.

And yet nothing in the world could be more pastoral and more simple:
a few trees, a few clouds, five or six clumps of wild thyme, a woman,
and a sunbeam over all like a gold chevron on a coat of arms.--There
was neither surprise nor bewilderment in my sensations. I knew
perfectly well where I was. I had never been to that precise spot, but
I remembered perfectly the shape of the trees and the position of the
clouds, the white dove that flew across the sky I had seen flying in
the same direction; the little silvery bell, which I then heard for
the first time, had often tinkled in my ears, and its voice seemed
to me like the voice of a friend; although I had never been there,
I had many times passed through that avenue with princesses mounted
on unicorns; my most voluptuous dreams rode there every evening and
my desires had exchanged kisses absolutely like the one exchanged by
myself and Rosette.--There was nothing new to me in that kiss; but it
was as I had thought it would be. It was perhaps the only time in my
life that I have not been disappointed and that the real has seemed to
me as beautiful as the ideal.--If I could find a woman, a landscape,
a building, anything that corresponded as closely to my desires as
that moment corresponded to the moment I had dreamed of, I should have
no reason to envy the gods, and I would gladly renounce my box in
paradise.--But, in truth, I do not believe that any man of flesh and
blood could have an hour of such exquisite enjoyment; two kisses like
that would pump a whole life dry and leave a complete void in a heart
and a body.--But no such consideration as that would stop me; for, not
being able to prolong my life indefinitely, I am ready to die, and I
should prefer to die of pleasure rather than of old age or ennui.

But that woman doesn't exist.--Yes, she does exist; it may be that only
a wall separates us.--Perhaps I jostled her in the street yesterday or
to-day.

In what does Rosette fall short of being that woman? In this, that I do
not believe she is. By what fatality do I always have for mistresses,
women that I do not love? Her neck is smooth enough to set off the
most beautifully-wrought necklaces; her fingers are taper enough to do
honor to the loveliest and richest rings; the ruby would blush with
pleasure to gleam on the pink lobe of her delicate ear; the cestus of
Venus would fit her waist; but Love alone has the secret of tying his
mother's scarf.

All Rosette's merit is in herself, I have attributed nothing to
her that she has not. I have not cast over her beauty the veil of
perfection with which love envelops the loved one;--the veil of Isis is
transparent beside that veil. Naught but satiety can raise the corner
of it.

I do not love Rosette; at least my love for her, if I have any, does
not resemble the ideal I have formed of love. It may be that my ideal
is not a just one, I do not dare to say. Certain it is that it makes me
insensible to the merits of other women, and I have desired no other
with any consistency since I have had her. If she has any reason to be
jealous, it is of phantoms only, about which she worries very little,
and yet her most formidable rival is my imagination; that is something
which, with all her shrewdness, she will probably never discover.

If women only knew!--How many infidelities the least fickle lover is
guilty of to the most adored mistress!--It is to be presumed that they
pay us back in full and more; but they do as we do and say nothing.
A mistress is a necessary subject, who ordinarily disappears under
flourishes and embroidery. Very often the kisses you give her are not
for her; you embrace the idea of another woman in her person, and she
profits not infrequently--if it can be called profiting--by the desires
aroused by another. Ah! my poor Rosette, how many times you have served
as a body to my dreams and given reality to your rivals; to how many
infidelities have you unwittingly been accessory! If you could have
imagined, at times when my arms clasped you so tightly, when my mouth
was most closely united to yours, that your beauty and your love had
nothing to do with my passion, that the thought of you was a hundred
leagues from my mind; what if some one had told you that those eyes,
veiled with amorous languor, were cast down simply in order not to look
at you and not to banish the illusion that you served only to complete,
and that, instead of being a mistress, you were simply an instrument of
lust, a means of assuaging a desire impossible of realization!

O divine creatures, ye lovely virgins, slender and diaphanous,
who lower your periwinkle eyes and clasp your lily hand in the
pictures with golden backgrounds of the old German masters, ye
stained-glass saints, ye missal martyrs who smile so sweetly amid
the convolutions of the arabesques, and come forth so fresh and fair
from the flower-bells!--O ye lovely courtesans lying all naked in
your hair on beds strewn with roses, beneath great purple curtains,
with your bracelets and necklaces of huge pearls, your fan and your
mirrors, gleaming in the shadow in the fiery rays of the setting
sun!--ye dark-skinned maidens of Titian, who display so wantonly your
undulating hips, your firm, round thighs, your polished breasts and
your supple and muscular loins!--ye antique goddesses, who rear your
white phantoms in the shady corners of gardens!--ye are a part of my
seraglio; I have possessed you all in turn.--Sainte Ursule, I have
kissed your hands on the fair hands of Rosette; I have toyed with the
black hair of the Muranese and Rosette never had such a hard task to
rearrange her hair: I have been with you more than Acteon was, O virgin
Diana, and I have not been changed to a stag: it was I who replaced
your handsome Endymion!--What a multitude of rivals whom she does not
suspect and upon whom she cannot be revenged! yet they are not all
painted or carved!

Women, when you notice that your lover is more affectionate than usual,
that he presses you in his arms with unwonted emotion; when he rests
his head upon your knees and raises it to look at you with moist and
wandering eyes; when enjoyment serves only to augment his desire and
he stifles your voice with his kisses as if he dreaded to hear it, be
sure that he simply does not know that you are there; that he has, at
that moment, an assignation with a chimera which you make palpable, and
whose part you play.--Many chamber-maids have profited by the love that
queens inspire.--Many women have profited by the love that goddesses
inspire, and a commonplace reality has often served as the pedestal
for an ideal idol. That is why poets habitually take dirty trollops for
mistresses.--You can lie ten years with a woman without ever seeing
her; that is the history of many great geniuses, whose ignoble or
obscure connections have caused the world to wonder.

I have been unfaithful to Rosette in no other way than that. I have
been false to her only for pictures and statues and she has been
equally concerned in the treachery. I have not the slightest material
sin upon my conscience with which to reproach myself. I am, in that
respect, as white as the snow-capped Jungfrau, and yet, while not in
love with anybody, I would like to be with some one. I do not seek the
opportunity, but I shall not be sorry if it comes; if it should come,
I might not use it, perhaps, for I have an innate conviction that it
would be the same with another, and I prefer that it should be so
with Rosette than with any other; for, take away the woman, I still
have a jolly companion, witty, and very agreeably depraved; and that
consideration is not one of the least of those that restrain me, for,
in losing the mistress, I might be distressed to find that I had lost
the friend.