Remy de Gourmont

“ I shall not have this beauty which pleases me, which I desire and which is mine. I can take her in my arms, I can press her against me, but I cannot have her. When I kiss her with as many kisses as deceit has tongues, still I shall not have her. And all the kinds of possession I can dream of are vain; even were I able to surround her like a wave, I should still not have her. The impulsion of love is unreal and it is only the illusion of desire which makes me believe in its possible accomplishment. ”

“ Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything—all is reduced to nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation—diamond dust! ”

“ Can a woman at a ball do anything better than let herself be seen?"
"And is it not a keen pleasure," returned Hubert, "to reveal one's arms, shoulders and neck?..."
"Very keen, no, but really the desires one evokes murmur in the ears like a flight of vernal butterflies and the rustling of their wings is sometimes soothing to the skin. You cannot understand, it is too feminine."
"Yes," murmured Hubert with a tender but undeniable irony. "Woman is a religion full of mysteries. ”

“ That evening, Hubert had had the courage to return to his home, to undress, to go to bed, to fall asleep, without admitting the intrusion, in his consciousness, of any thought. He was like a beaten dog filled with an irrational shame, and buried under the heavy covers, his eyes shut, he had attained sleep by a system of long and slow inhalings which, regulating the heart movement, calmed, then enfeebled the brain, like chloral.
In the morning, his adventure brought a smile to his face, and he even composed, in a tone of sad raillery, a series of little acrobatic verses, entitled: The Thread. ”

“ Ah! how much more interesting it is to watch oneself think: what spectacle equals that of the human brain, that marvelous hive where the ideal bees, in their nest of cells, distil thought: a fleeting activity, but which at least gives the illusion of duration. Ah! merely illusion, for only the eternal exists.
At this point in his revery Entragues was bitten by a serpent: the external, disdained and almost disowned world was evoked in the image of Sixtine. ”

“ To feel yourself loved, it is necessary to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith—two aspects of one entity—the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy of union. ”

“ What is the color of my soul?" asked Sixtine, wishing to make use, like all women, of the least general idea.
"A changing blond, a flame blond, or if you wish to decompose the nuance, tawny, ash and gold. Tawny is savagery, ash is nonchalance, gold is passion. Your horoscope will be like this: a woman fluctuating between the desire to be enchained to tenderness and her love of independence, but who will resign herself to the choice which circumstances make for her; as indolence is a bad body guard, it is probable that she will be won...." ”

“ Guido cried.
Pavona opened her eyes.
They were fearful. They were like the eyes designed on the plumes of a peacock, a white peacock.
Guido swooned and awoke in his cell, an assassin, a thief, a perjurer.
"I am a wretch," he thought, after a moment, "a wretch unworthy of his own pity. The crimes one commits in dreaming, one is really capable of committing. What occurs in the dream lay dormant in the caves of the will, or rather, they are prophecies and the celestial admonition of an irrevocable predestination. Ah! rather to have been criminal than to live in the certitude of a future crime. ”

“ The futility of my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness. Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone, indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun—death? I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite despicable thoroughfare. ”

“ At first, not any more than yourself, Monsieur Moscowitch never asked more than the pleasure of seeing me."
"He is fascinating."
"Isn't he?" returned Sixtine. "He pleases me very much and I believe that with him I shall never be bored."
"Ah! you are quite perverse, but perhaps that is why I love you."
"Perverse, because I do not wish to be bored!"
"No, boredom is the terror of every woman, and they commit half of their crimes to escape its claws. But it is useless. Boredom, impassive, smokes his houka and maintains his slaves. ”

“ A blasphemous comparison had made him liken her to a Magdalene suddenly seized with adoration, her soul just surrendered to a revealed God, lovely with inner and useless supplications, so persuaded to love above herself that a gesture of acquiescence would overwhelm her with joy.
This quite surprising spectacle charmed Entragues, but he felt his fault aggravated by this prolonged titillation. It had ceased to be the simple shock necessary to re-establish his composure, and had inexcusably become a pleasure in itself. ”

“ Sixtine forestalled him:
"What end are you aiming at? Love is too fleeting for your stability, let us admit. In that case, where does your life lead? Ah! poet, to success?"
"I am not a poet. I do not know how to cut my thoughts into little morsels that may be equal or unequal, according to the chance of the chopping knife. My prose gets its rhythm only through my breath. Only the pin thrusts of sensation mark its accents and the royal puerility of rich rhymes passes my understanding...."
The vlouement of a crow's wings agitated the air above the trees. Hubert remained silent, listening. ”

“ Alas! it is really true that no one has ever implored me in vain. I cannot resist love's invocations, and when I am called with faith, I open the portal of heaven, and an angel lifts me on his wings."
"Adored Madonna," murmured Guido, kissing feet that were pure as the dew, "I am unworthy of your favors and see, my kisses are full of tears. Virgin of all love, my love was but a drop of water, and you have taken it in the holy lily of your heart. Be blessed for your goodness." ”

“ Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous; it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture, a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more rousing. ”

“ Entragues shrugged his shoulders, thinking: "One would say that above is someone who is stronger and who mocks at us."
Then, he rang.
She was tired, pale despite the red of her robe, reclining in a large arm-chair, barricaded with cushions, very near a big wood fire; she was reading, her head thrown back.
The light, feeble and bluish, fell from a suspended lamp. Hubert suspected that she could not decipher the printed pages and thought she had assumed an attitude, but he was mistaken: Sixtine, like many women, had the eyes of a cat; she was very seriously reading les Victimes d'Amour. ”

“ But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care, respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words written in letters of gold: LITERATURE.
He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! ”

“ My mind at least is above all wiles and lusts. They who fall into the toils of the swine-breeders, those who are caught in the snares of elegant vampires—they fulfill their destiny. Mine is different. I shall be cowardly neither in facing grief, nor in facing pleasure, nor in facing ennui. You will not make me suffer beyond my will; and neither you, nor any one like you, can tempt me to other disobediences. Even though I be the dupe of my pride, I prefer this to being the dupe of my sensitiveness, and I shall disdain even the memory of the unconscious murderess who might have overwhelmed me. ”

“ Her restless studded fingers clasped her knees that were covered with a red robe. Hubert embraced the knees and kissed the fingers. It was the same as happens with little serpents in skins of old silver found under withered ferns, in the sunlight; as soon as one touches them, they stiffen and become as brittle as glass. Sixtine, at this brusque contact, grew rigid as a lady of stone in her emblazoned seat, and Hubert felt that the least insistence would shatter that soul. It was too late. As Sixtine had so well conjectured, the startled occasion had fled. ”

“ Though I accept it, it is a human weakness. To love so much that one wishes to die—that test I have had in adolescence, and the reasonable insensibility of the woman I adored has never shed any bitterness on that far off remembrance. I do not smile pityingly on these days of umbrageous follies. After ten or eleven years, I am as sure as I was at the first hour of having been deprived of the greatest happiness put within reach of my hands by the Decrees, and in moments of emotion this regret can still throw a gloom over my revery. ”

“ Then night fell and it seemed to Guido that a most notable miracle had suspended, for several instants, the sun at the horizon's edge.
"He is guilty, quite guilty," Veltro reflected, "but he has piety, he regrets his crimes. May the madonna listen to him!"
"Listen to me, my lord," added the jailor, "and know that there is no better recourse in the world than to implore the Novella. You see it is not for nothing that she is called the Madonna of the Orphans! Her arms always are open and she does not carry a babe because all God's creatures are her children. ”

“ Sensuality is the ferment of feminine nature: without this decisive gift, there might be angels, there would be no women. But it is quite true that I have not known how to awaken its might and my magnetism struck sudden neutralities. You are not a woman of good-will: your very pride leads you to inopportune resistance where force alone could be right! It is there that one is the dupe of one's intelligence! One must have the strength to throw it off, at certain hours, like a cloak or like the chemise of the Roman woman. ”

“ The adorable woman surrendered to his kisses; the carnal dream made them unconscious of good and evil; they advanced, eagerly and with swimming heads, ready to place their feet on the bark that sails towards the Isle of Delights, seeking to ascertain how the sails were shifting and the condition of the rudder. Entragues suddenly got up, pale; ghostly behind the window curtains, terrible in her red robe, Sixtine had revealed herself.
"Ah!" he vaguely thought, terrified, but his own self again, "this is reality. The illusions are reaped, the hay is brought in, the field is bare. ”