that I had desired;-nothing was wanting, only the lady was a man;-but I confess to you that for the moment I had completely forgotten this.
“Theodore must be a woman disguised; the thing is impossible otherwise. Such beauty, even for a woman, is not the beauty of a man, were he Antinous, the friend of Adrian; were he Alexis, the friend of Virgil. It is a woman, by heaven, and I was very foolish to torment myself in such a manner. In this way everything is explained in the most natural fashion in the world, and I am not such a monster as I believed.
“Would God put those long, dark, silken fringes on the coarse eyelids of man? Would he dye our ugly blobber- lipped and hair-bristling mouths with carmine so delicate and bright? Our bones, hewn into shape as with blows of a hedge-bill and coarsely fitted together, are not worthy of being swaddled in such white and tender flesh; our indented skulls are not made to be bathed in floods of such wonderful hair.
“O beauty! we were created only to love thee and worship thee on our knees, if we have found thee, and to seek thee eternally through the world, if this happiness has not been given to us; but to possess thee, to be thyself, is possible only to angels and to women. Lovers, poets, painters and sculptors, we all seek to raise 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 it is everlasting despair to be unable to give palpability to the beauty that you feel, and to be enshrouded in a body which in no way realizes the body which you know to be yours.
“I once saw a young man who had robbed me of the form that I ought to have had. The rascal was just such as I should have wished to be. He had the beauty of my ugliness, and beside him I looked like a rough sketch of him. He was of my height, but more slender and vigorous; his figure resembled mine, but had an elegance and nobility that I do not possess. His eyes were not of a different color than my own, but they had a look and a brilliancy that mine will never have. His nose had been cast in the same mould as mine, but it seemed to have been retouched by the chisel of a skilful statuary; the nostrils were more open and more impassioned, the flat parts more cleanly cut, and there was something heroic in it which is altogether wanting to that respectable portion of my individuality: you would have said that nature had first tried in my person to make this perfected self of mine.
“I looked like the erased and shapeless draught of the thought whereof he was the copy in fair, moulded writing. When I saw him walk, stop, salute the ladies, sit and lie down with the perfect grace which results from beauty of proportion, I was seized with sadness and frightful jealousy, such as must be felt by the clay model drying and splitting obscurely in a corner of the studio, while the haughty marble statue, which would not have existed without it, stands proudly on its sculptured socle, and attracts the attention and praises of the visitors. For the rogue is, after all, only my own self which has succeeded a little better, and been cast with less rebellious bronze, that has made its way more exactly into the hollows of the mould. I think that he has great hardihood to strut in this way with my form and to display as much insolence as though he were an original type: he is, when all is said, only a plagiarism from me, for I was born before him, and without me nature would not have conceived the idea of making him as he is.
“When women praised his good manners and personal charms, I had every inclination in the world to rise and say to them-' Pools that you are, just praise me directly, for this gentleman is myself and it is uselessly circuitous to transmit to him what is destined to come back to me.' At other times I itched horribly to strangle him and to turn his soul out of the body which belonged to me, and I would prowl about him with compressed lips and clenched fists like a lord prowling around his palace in which a family of ragamuffins has established itself in his absence, and not knowing how to cast them out. For the rest, this young man is stupid, and succeeds all the better for it. And sometimes I envy him his stupidity more than his beauty.
“The Gospel saying about the poor in spirit is not complete: 'They shall have the kingdom of Heaven.' I know nothing about that, and it is a matter of indifference to me; but they most certainly have the kingdom of the earthy — they have the money and the beautiful women, in other words the only two desirable things in the world. Do you know a sensible man who is rich, or a fellow with heart and some merit who has a passable mistress? Although Theodore is very handsome, I nevertheless have not wished for his beauty, and I would rather he had it than I.
“Those strange loves of which the elegies of the ancient poets are full, which surprised us so much and which we could not understand, are probable, therefore, and possible. In the translations that we used to make of them we substituted the names of women for those which were actually there. Juventius was made to terminate as Juventia, Alexis was changed into Ianthe. The beautiful boys became beautiful girls, we thus reconstructed the monstrous seraglio of Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and the gentle Virgil. It was a very gallant occupation which only proved how little we had comprehended the ancient genius.
“lama man of the Homeric times; the world in which I live is not mine, and I have no comprehension of the society which surrounds me. Christ has not come for me; I am as much a pagan as were Alcibiades and Phidias. I have never gone to pluck passion flowers upon Golgotha, and the deep river which flows from the side of the Crucified One and forms a red girdle around the world has not bathed me in its flood. My rebellious body will not recognize the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh does not admit that it should be mortified. I deem the earth as fair as heaven, and I think that correctness of form is virtue. Spirituality does not suit me, I prefer a statue to a phantom, and noon to twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendor, solidity and color. My dreams are composed of them, and all my chimerical palaces are constructed of these materials.
“Sometimes I have other dreams, — of long cavalcades of perfectly white horses, without harness or bridle, ridden by beautiful naked youths who defile across a band of dark blue color as on the friezes of the Parthenon, or of theories of young girls crowned with bandelets, with straight-folded tunics and ivory sistra, who seem to wind around an immense vase. Never mist or vapor, never anything uncertain or wavering. My sky has no clouds, or, if there be any, they are solid chiseled-carved clouds, formed with the marble fragments fallen from the statue of Jupiter. Mountains with sharp-cut ridges indent it abruptly on the borders, and the sun, leaning on one of the loftiest summits, opens wide his lion-yellow eye with its golden lashes. The grasshopper cries and sings, the corn-ear cracks; the shadow, vanquished and exhausted by the heat, rolls itself up and collects itself at the foot of the trees: everything is radiant, shining and resplendent. The smallest detail becomes firm and is boldly accentuated; every object assumes a robust form and color. There is no room for the softness and dreaming of Christian art.
“Such a world is mine. The streams in my landscapes fall in a sculptured tide from a sculptured urn; through the tall green reeds, sonorous as those of the Eurotas, may be seen glistening the round, silvery hip of some nymph with glaucous hair. Here is Diana passing through this dark oak forest with her quiver at her back, her flying scarf, and her buskins with intertwining bands. She is followed by her pack and her nymphs with harmonious names. My pictures are painted with four tints, like the pictures of the primitive painters, and often they are only colored basso-relievos; for I love to touch what I have seen with my finger and to pursue the roundness of the outlines into its most fugitive windings; I view each thing from every side and go around it with a light in my hand.
“I have looked upon love in the light of antiquity and as a more or less perfect piece of sculpture. How is this arm? Pretty well. The hands are not wanting in delicacy. What do you think of this foot? I think that the ankle is without nobility, and that the heel is commonplace. But the breast is well placed and of good shape, the serpentine line is sufficiently undulating, the shoulders are plump and of a handsome character. This woman would be a passable model, and it would be possible to cast several portions of her. Let us love her.
“I have always been thus. I look upon women with the eyes of a sculptor and not of a lover. I have all my life been troubled about the shape of the flagon, never about the quality of its contents. I might have had Pandora's box in my hand, and I believe that I should not have opened it. Just now I said that Christ had not come for me; Mary, star of the modern Heaven, sweet mother of the glorious babe, has not come either.
“For a long time and very often I have stopped beneath the stone foliage in cathedrals, in the trembling brightness from the windows, at an hour when the organ was moaning of itself, when an invisible finger touched the keys and the wind breathed in the pipes, and I have plunged my eyes deep into the pale azure of the long eyes of the Madonna. I have followed piously the wasted oval of her face, and the scarcely indicated arch of her eyebrows; I have admired her smooth and luminous brow, her chastely transparent temples, her cheek-bones shaded with a sober virginal color, tenderer than the blossom of the peach; I have counted one by one the beautiful golden lashes casting their palpitating shadow; through the half-tint which bathes her I have distinguished the fleeting lines of her frail and modestly bended neck; I have even, with rash hand, raised the folds of her tunic and contemplated unveiled the virgin, milk-distended bosom which was never pressed but by lips divine; I have pursued its delicate blue veins into their most imperceptible ramifications, I have laid my finger upon it that I might cause the celestial drink to spring forth in white streams; I have touched with my mouth the bud of the mystic rose.
“Well! I confess that all this immaterial beauty, so winged and vaporous that one feels that it is about to take its flight, has affected me very moderately. I prefer the Venus Anadyomene a thousand times. The antique eyes
