“ But the image of Hippolyte reappeared; and he felt within him a new upheaval, so tumultuous that the young man gave vent to a sigh on his mother's knees.
"How you sigh!" she murmured, bending over him. Without raising his eyelids, he smiled; but an immense prostration came over him—a desolate lassitude, a desperate desire to withdraw from this truceless struggle.
The desire to live left him little by little, as the heat gradually leaves a corpse.
Of the recent emotion nothing remained; his mother had once more become a stranger to him. "What could he do for her? Save her? Restore peace to her? ”

“ He does not speak, or laugh, or play; he is never merry, and he never does what other children do. And it seems to me that he loves me so much, that he adores me! He never leaves my side, never. I begin to believe that he only lives from my breath. Oh! George, if I were to tell you of certain days, long, long days, which seem endless. I work near the window; I raise my eyes, and I meet his eyes gazing, gazing at me. It is a slow torture, a punishment that I cannot describe. It is as if I felt my blood flowing drop by drop from my heart."
She stopped, choked by anguish. ”

“ Drying her tears, she went on:
"If at least the one I am bearing is born, I will not say beautiful, but with health! If, for this once, God will come to my aid!"
She became silent, attentive, as if to draw an omen from the trembling of the new life which she carried in her womb. George took her hand. And for several minutes the brother and sister sat mute and motionless on the bench, overwhelmed by existence.
Before them stretched out the solitary and abandoned garden. The cypress-trees, straight and motionless, reared their tall trunks religiously towards the sky, like votive candles. ”

“ I love Hippolyte; I love her with a passion which I should judge to be everlasting, did I not know that all human passion must cease at some time. I love her, and I cannot imagine keener voluptuous delights than those she gives me. More than once, however, at the sight of some passing woman, I have been seized with a sudden desire; more than once has the flash of a pair of feminine eyes thrown me into a melancholy train of thought; more than once I have dreamed of meeting some woman—a woman perceived in a drawing-room, or the mistress of a friend. ”

“ She was pale, but it was that singular pallor which George had never found in any other woman—an almost mortal pallor, a profound and dead pallor which, when in the shade, became almost livid. A long shadow was cast on the upper part of her cheeks by the eyelashes; a masculine shadow, barely perceptible, veiled the upper lip. The mouth, large if anything, had a sinuous curve, very soft and yet sad, which, in the absolute silence, took on a very intense expression.
George thought: "How spiritual her beauty becomes in illness and in languor! Tired as she is now, she pleases me more. ”

“ And she, in the ingenuousness of her egotism, with that tenacious animalism which is the basis of the feminine being, was intoxicated by nothing more than by this passing poesy. Her happiness was to appear in her lover's eyes idealized, like the first evening in the bluish street, or again in the secret oratory amid the religious music and the faded perfumes, or like on the wild path strewn with furze.
In her most chaste voice, she asked:
"When do we go?"
"Will you go to-morrow?"
"Very well—to-morrow."
"Take care! If you rise, you won't be able to come down." ”

“ And, after another pause, in a tender voice:
"How she must adore you!"
An unexpected emotion swelled George's heart, and before him reappeared the interior vision of the house he had abandoned, forgotten, and, for a moment, all the past sorrows came back to his mind, together with all the painful pictures: his mother's emaciated face, her eyelids swollen and reddened by tears; the sweet and heart-breaking remembrance of Christine; the sickly child whose large head was always bent on a breast barren of all but sighs; the cadaveric mask of the poor idiotic gormand. ”

“ At moments, the orchestra had the crepitations of a funereal pyre. The violence of the pain traversed him at times with tempestuous impetuosity, reviving the flames. Sudden starts shook him; atrocious cries escaped from it; choking sobs were extinguished in it. "The philter! the philter! the terrible philter! with what fury I feel it mount from my heart to my brain! Henceforth no remedy, no sweet death, can deliver me from the torture of desire. In no place, in no spot, alas! shall I find repose. The night repulses me toward the day, and the eye of the sun feeds on my perpetual suffering. ”

“ But there was not awakened in him the extraordinary emotion which had several times exalted and astounded him in the first days of his stay at the Hermitage, before the arrival of the loved one. He could resuscitate neither the panicky intoxication of the first day, when he had believed he truly felt the sun in his heart, nor the melancholy charm of the first solitary walk, nor the unexpected and divine joy which had been communicated to him on that May morning by the song of Favetta and the perfume of the furze, freshened by the dew. On the earth and on the sea, men cast a tragic shadow. ”

“ The great phrase of love—that spread out in such a wide circle of light around the transfiguration of Ysolde—had also enclosed Hippolyte in its charm. She repeated it ceaselessly in a low tone, sometimes even in a loud voice, with signs of exuberant joy.
"Wouldn't you like to die such a death as Ysolde's?" asked George, with a smile.
"I would," she answered. "But, on earth, people don't die like that." ”

“ Tired, happy, she wept and smiled beneath the innumerable kisses of the adored one. What mattered the recollections of the days from which he had been absent? What mattered the miseries, the chagrins, the anxieties, the heart-breaking struggles against the inexorable brutalities of life? What mattered all the discouragements and all the despairs, in comparison with this supreme joy? She lived, she respired between her lover's arms; she felt herself infinitely loved. All else disappeared, returned to oblivion, seemed to have never existed.
"Oh, Hippolyte, Hippolyte! Oh, my soul! ”

“ I confess that a proud joy swells my heart when I see Hippolyte delirious with sensual delight. I feel she is happy at thus showing herself so vanquished and prostrated by my power; and she also knows that my vain ambition as a young lover is precisely to succeed in making her plead for mercy, in drawing from her a convulsive cry, in seeing her fall back exhausted on the pillow. Which, then, in these demonstrations, is the share of the physical sincerity and that of the passionate exaggeration? Is not her ardor an artificial attitude, assumed to please me? ”

“ I feel a delicious happiness invade my being, a happiness which at certain moments results from your presence alone. I caress you, I speak to you, I listen to you, I abandon myself entirely. All at once, a thought chills me. If, without being aware of it, I had evoked in your memory the phantom of a former sensation, melancholy relic of by-gone days? Never can I describe my anguish. This ardor, which induces in me the illusory feeling of I know not what communion between you and me, dies out all at once. You escape me, you steal away, you become inaccessible. ”

“ They rose and regained the road by which they had come. Slowly and with tearful accents Hippolyte murmured: "What a sad evening, O my love!"
And she stopped as if to recall and live over again the sorrows scattered through the day that was about to close. Around them, now, the Pincio was deserted, full of silence, full of violet shadows in which the busts on their pedestals took on the appearance of funereal monuments. Below, the city was covered with ashes. A few drops of rain were falling.
"Where shall we go to-night? What are you going to do?" she asked. ”

“ I am always the unconquered. You have known with me all the enjoyments for which your endless desire was thirsty, and I will clothe myself in lies that will endlessly provoke your desire. What matters to me your perspicacity? The veil that you tear I can repair in an instant, the bandage that you pluck off I can fasten in an instant. I am stronger than your thought. I know the secret of my transfigurations in your soul. I know the gestures and the words that have the virtue of metamorphosing me in your eyes. The odor of my skin has the power to dissolve a world in you. ”

“ They felt now indefinable lassitude and melancholy. George seemed astonished. So Life, unexpectedly, like a furtive gesture in the shadow, had offered him a new savour—a new sensation, real and profound, at the close of a day full of anxiety, spent in a cloister of flitting phantoms! But was that Life? Was it not rather Dreamland? "The one is always the shadow of the other," he thought. There where is Life, there is Dreamland; there where is Dreamland, there is Life.
"Look!" interrupted Hippolyte, with a start of admiration. ”

“ Then she began to chant.
She chanted her sorrow in a rhythm that rose and fell regularly, like the palpitation of a heart.
It was an ancient monody that, from time immemorial, in the region of the Abruzzi, the women chanted over the loss of their kin. It was the melodious eloquence of the sacred sorrow that spontaneously wells up from the depths of the being, that hereditary rhythm in which the mothers of other times had modulated their lament.
She chanted, chanted:
"Open your eyes, arise, walk, my son! How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!" ”

“ These shrieks, which rent the breasts that emitted them; these syllables repeated without cease, with the persistence of the same unconquerable faith; this thick smoke, which overhung like the cloud of a tempest; this contact of bodies, this mixture of breaths, the sight of this blood and these tears—all this made that at one moment the entire multitude found itself possessed by a single soul, became a single being, miserable and terrible, having but one gesture, but one voice, but one convulsion, but one frenzy. All the evils melted into one single evil, which the Virgin should destroy ”

“ No! It is not for you to suffer. God has kept you far away from this house. It is not for you to suffer. All my life, since your birth, all my life, always, always, I have sought to spare you a single pain, a moment's unhappiness. Oh! why did I not have the strength to remain silent this time? I should have said nothing; I should not have told you. Forgive me, George. I did not think I should cause you so much unhappiness. Don't cry any more, I entreat you. George, I entreat you, don't cry any more. I cannot bear to see you cry."
She was on the point of breaking down, overcome by anguish. ”

“ The odor of the medicines heaped together on a table near the bed pervaded the room. A fly detached itself from the wall, flew with a loud buzz towards the flame of the lamp, and alighted on the coverlid. A piece of furniture creaked in the heavy silence.
"He is falling asleep," said George in a low voice.
Both were absorbed in the contemplation of the child's slumber, which suggested to both the image of death. A species of oppressive stupor dominated them, without their being able to distract their thoughts from the picture. ”

“ The old woman did not change her attitude. Something great, terrible, and indefinitely supernatural emanated from her solitary old age in the shadow of the arid and almost petrified olive-tree whose cleft trunk seemed marked by a bolt from heaven. If she still lived, her eyes at least did not see, her ears no longer heard, all her senses were obliterated. Yet she had the appearance of a Witness who was looking towards the invisible region of eternity. "Death is not as mysterious as this remnant of life in this human ruin," thought George. ”