Théophile Gautier

“ Rosette acted her part with a melancholy and caressing grace, a sorrowful, resigned tone that went to the heart;—and when Rosalind said to her: "I would love you, if I could," the tears were ready to overflow, and she could hardly hold them back, for Phœbe's story is her own, as Orlando's is mine, with this difference, that everything turns out happily for Orlando, and that Phœbe, disappointed in her love, is compelled to marry Sylvius instead of the charming ideal she longed to embrace. Such is life: that which affords happiness to one necessarily causes another unhappiness. ”

“ Lovers, poets, painters and sculptors, we all seek to erect an altar to thee, the lover in his mistress, the poet in his song, the painter in his canvas, the sculptor in his marble; but the source of everlasting despair is the inability to give tangible form to the beauty one feels, and to be enveloped by a body which does not realize the idea of the body you understand to be yours. ”

“ My sky has no clouds, or, if it has any, they are solid clouds, carved with the sculptor's chisel, made from blocks of marble that have fallen from the statue of Jupiter. Mountains with sharply-outlined peaks rise abruptly along its edges, and the sun, leaning on one of the highest summits, opens wide its yellow lion's eye with the golden eyelids.—The grasshopper chirps and sings, and the corn bursts its sheath; the vanquished shadow, unable to withstand the heat, musters its platoons and takes refuge at the foot of the trees; everything is radiant and glowing and resplendent. ”

“ When I grew older, the pleasing phantom possessed me even more completely. I saw it always between me and the women I had for mistresses, smiling ironically and mocking at their human beauty with all the perfection of its divine beauty. It made women who were really charming seem ugly to me—women well adapted to make any man happy who was not in love with the adorable shadow, whose body I did not believe to be in existence, but which was only the premonition of your beauty. O Rosalind! how wretched I have been because of you before I knew you! O Théodore! ”

“ Since I have lived with men, I have seen so many women shamefully betrayed, so many secret liaisons imprudently divulged, the purest passions recklessly dragged in the wind, young men hurrying off to vile harlots from the arms of the most charming mistresses, the most firmly-established intrigues broken off suddenly and for no plausible reason, that it is no longer possible for me to make up my mind to take a lover.—It would be like throwing myself into a bottomless abyss in broad daylight with my eyes open.—However, it is still the secret longing of my heart to have one. ”

“ It was Rosalind herself, so fair and radiant that she lighted up the whole room,—with the strings of pearls in her hair, her prismatic dress, her ample lace sleeves, her red-heeled shoes, her lovely peacock's-feather fan,—in a word, just as she was on the day of the play. But there was this important and decisive difference, that she had neither neckerchief nor wimple nor ruff nor anything at all to conceal from his eyes those two charming hostile twin brothers,—who, alas! are only too often inclined to be reconciled. ”

“ Phœbe is a shepherdess in the forest of Arden, madly loved by the shepherd Sylvius, whom she cannot endure and whom she treats with consistent and crushing cruelty. Phœbe is as cold as the moon for whom she is named; she has a heart of snow that does not melt in the fire of the most ardent sighs, but whose frozen crust grows thicker and thicker and becomes as hard as the diamond; but she has no sooner seen Rosalind in the costume of the comely page, Ganymede, than all that ice dissolves in tears and the diamond becomes softer than wax. The haughty Phœbe, who laughed at love, is in love herself ”

“ Beauty must needs blush for itself and put on a winding-sheet.—Ye comely youths with your limbs rubbed in oil, who struggle in the lyceum or the gymnasium, under the brilliant sky, in the sunlight of Attica, before the marvelling crowd; ye maidens of Sparta who dance the bibase, and who run naked to the summit of Taygetus, resume your tunics and chlamydes;—your reign is past. And ye, moulders of marble, Prometheuses in bronze, break your chisels:—there will be no more sculptors.—The palpable world is dead. ”

“ If I attempt to take my flight, the air condenses around me and I am caught, with out-stretched wings, unable to close them.—I can neither walk nor fly; the sky attracts me when I am on the earth, the earth when I am in the sky; aloft, the north wind pulls out my feathers; below, the stones wound my feet. My soles are too tender to walk on the broken glass of reality; the spread of my wings is too narrow to enable me to soar above earthly things, and to rise from circle to circle to the deep azure of mysticism, to the inaccessible summits of everlasting love ”

“ Venus comes forth from the sea to visit the world—as befits a divinity who loves men—alone and naked.—She prefers the earth to Olympus, and has more men than gods for lovers; she does not envelop herself in the languorous veils of mysticism; she stands, her dauphin behind her, her foot upon her shell of mother-of-pearl; the sun strikes upon her gleaming breast, and with her white hand, she holds in the air the wavy masses of her lovely hair, in which old father Ocean has scattered his most perfect pearls.—You can see her ”

“ O Graciosa, I shall never love any one, either man or woman, with all my heart; there is always something unsatisfied grumbling within me, and the lover or the friend fills the need of only one side of my character. If I had a lover, such feminine qualities as I have would dominate the virile part of me, I doubt not, but that would last but a short time, and I feel that I should be only half content; if I have a friend of my own sex, the thought of sensual pleasure prevents me from enjoying to the full the pure pleasure of the mind ”

“ But you are a woman; we are no longer living in the days of the Metamorphoses;—Adonis and Hermaphroditus are dead,—and such a degree of beauty cannot now be attained by a man;—for, since heroes and gods are no more, women alone retain in their marble bodies, as in a Grecian temple, the priceless gift of shape anathematized by Christ, and prove that earth has no reason to envy heaven; you worthily represent the first divinity in the world, the purest symbol of the eternal essence—beauty. ”

“ There is within you an inexhaustible spring of charms, an ever-gushing fountain of irresistible seductions; you are a casket, always open, of the most precious pearls, and in your slightest movements, in your most careless gestures, in your most unstudied poses, you scatter to right and left inestimable treasures of beauty, with royal profusion. If the graceful undulations of a contour, the fleeting outlines of an attitude, could be fixed and preserved in a mirror, the mirrors before which you pass would cause the divinest canvases of Raphael to be despised and looked upon as tavern signs. ”

“ After that, if there still remained anything for me to do, it would be to take some one I loved, whether it were a porter or a horse-jockey; but I do not love even a porter. O wretched heroine that I am! an unmated turtle-dove, condemned to coo forever in elegiacs!
Oh! how many times I have longed to be really a man as I seemed to be! How many women there are with whom I could have come to an understanding, whose hearts would have understood my heart!—how perfectly happy the refined pleasures of love, the noble outbursts of pure passion to which I could have responded, would have made me! ”

“ Make haste; in a few years slender silvery threads will glide in among its dense masses;—these roses smell sweet to-day, to-morrow they will have the odor of death and will be only the dead bodies of roses.—Let us inhale your roses so long as they resemble your cheeks; let us kiss your cheeks so long as they resemble your roses.—When you are old, Cynthia, no one will care aught for you, not even the lictor's assistants if you should pay them, and you will run after me whom you repulse to-day. ”

“ Yes, Madelinette has not remained like her companions, her elbows lazily resting on the balcony rail, between the window jasmine and volubilis, watching the violet fringe of the horizon across the plain or some little rose-colored cloud moving gently in the May breeze. She has not carpeted mother-of-pearl palaces with lily leaves, to furnish quarters for her chimeras; she has not, like you, lovely dreamers, arrayed some hollow phantom in all imaginable perfections; she has sought to compare the illusions of her heart with the reality; she has chosen to know men before giving herself to a man ”

“ I am the pole toward which a restless magnet tends; my eye is a heaven, my mouth a paradise more ardently longed for than the real; if I should die, a warm shower of tears would keep my ashes warm, my grave would be brighter with flowers than a wedding-feast; if I were in danger, some one would throw himself between the point of the sword and my breast and sacrifice himself for me!"—it is lovely, and I cannot think what more one can desire in this world. ”

“ When she sees a mind standing on its pride as upon a high pillar and almost touching the sky with its head, she whispers to the red fluid to make haste and hurry to the doors of the arteries; she orders the temples to throb, the ears to ring, and lo, the lofty idea is attacked with vertigo: all its images become confused and indistinguishable, the earth seems to rise and fall like a ship's deck in a storm, the sky goes round and the stars dance a saraband; the lips which emitted naught but austere moral maxims, close and put themselves forward as if for a kiss ”

“ My feeling for this young man is really incredible; no woman ever disturbed my peace of mind so strangely. The sound of his clear, silvery voice acts upon my nerves and excites me in a most peculiar way; my soul hangs upon his lips, like a bee upon a flower, to drink the honey of his words.—I cannot brush against him as we pass without shivering from head to foot, and in the evening, when the time comes to say good-night and he gives me his soft, satiny hand, my whole life rushes to the place he has touched and I can feel the pressure of his fingers an hour after. ”

“ Mary, despite the humble air that she affects, is much too haughty for me; the tip of her toes, swathed in white bands, hardly rests upon the globe, already turning blue in the distance, on which the ancient dragon writhes.—Her eyes are the loveliest on earth, but they are always looking up toward the sky or down at her feet; they never look you in the face,—they have never served as a mirror to a human form.—And then, I do not like the clouds of smiling cherubs who circle about her head in a light vapor. ”

“ If only I could have, like you, young Orlando, a vast cool forest to which to retire and live alone in my sorrow, and if, at a turning in a path, I could meet her whom I seek, recognizable, although disguised!—But, alas! the world of the soul has no verdant Arden, and only in the garden of poesy do the capricious little wild-flowers bloom whose perfumes make one oblivious of everything. In vain do we shed tears, they do not form those lovely silvery cascades ”

“ Why, you would have said he had never worn any other costume in his life! he is not in the least embarrassed in his movements, he walks very well and doesn't stumble over his train; he plays with his eyes and fan to perfection; and such a slender figure he has!—you could clasp it with your fingers!—It's a most extraordinary thing! it's unconceivable!—The illusion is as complete as possible: one would almost say that he has a bosom, his neck is so fat and well filled out; and not a single hair of beard, not one; and how soft his voice is! Oh! what a lovely Rosalind! ”

“ I gazed at her for some time with indefinable emotion and pleasure, and the thought came to my mind that men are more favored than we in their passions, that we give the most priceless treasures into their possession and that they have nothing similar to offer us.—What a delight it must be to run one's lips over that fine, smooth skin, those swelling contours which seem to go out to meet the kiss and provoke it! that satiny flesh, those waving lines which melt into one another, the silky hair that is so soft to the touch ”

“ Spiritual matters are not my forte, I like a statue better than a phantom and high noon better than twilight. Three things delight my soul: gold, marble, and purple,—brilliancy, solidity, color. My dreams are made of those, and all the palaces I build for my chimeras are constructed with those materials.—Sometimes I have other dreams—of long cavalcades of snow-white horses, without saddle or bridle, ridden by handsome, naked young men, who pass upon a band of deep blue as on the friezes of the Parthenon ”

“ You did not choose that any living man should divulge the mysteries of your bed; the words of love that flew from your lips were not to be repeated.—Thus you retained your pure illusion. Experience did not tear away, bit by bit, the charming phantom you had cradled in your arms. You chose to be separated from him by a sudden blow of the axe rather than by slow distaste.—What torture, in very truth, to see the man one has chosen belying every moment the idea one has conceived of him ”

“ I am the most wretched hippogriff, the most miserable collection of heterogeneous odds and ends that has ever existed since the ocean first loved the moon and women deceived men: the monstrous Chimera put to death by Bellerophon, with his maiden's head, his lion's claws, his goat's body and his dragon's tail, was an animal of a simple make-up beside me.
In my frail breast the violet-strewn reveries of the modest maiden and the insensate ardor of courtesans on a debauch live side by side; my desires go about like lions, sharpening their claws in the dark and seeking something to devour ”

“ It must be that Théodore is a woman in disguise; it cannot be otherwise. His excessive beauty, excessive even for a woman, is not the beauty of a man, were he Antinous, the friend of Adrian, or Alexis, the friend of Virgil.—He is a woman, parbleu! and I am a fool to have tormented myself so. In that way everything is explained as naturally as possible, and I am not such a monster as I thought.
Does God put such long, dark, silky fringes upon a man's coarse eyelids? Would he tinge our vile, thick-lipped, hairy mouths with that bright, delicate carmine? ”