image never leaves them, is it not natural that arms open at last, that lips meet and bodies touch?
Have you never wanted to kiss anyone? Tell me whether lips do not call to lips, whether the bright glance that seems to pierce our veins does not rouse fierce and irresistible desires.
True, you say, that is the snare, the shameful snare. What matter?—I know it, I fall in it and I love it. Nature gives us the caress of love to hide her cunning, to force us—against our will—to perpetuate the human race. Let us therefore will the caress, make it ours, refine it, change it, idealise it, if you like. Let us too deceive Nature, the arch deceiver. Let us do more than she has willed, more than she could or dared teach us. Think that the caress of love is a precious thing taken from the earth in its rough state, and let us take it and work over it and perfect it, careless of the original design, the hidden will of the being you call God. And since it is thought that idealises everything, let us idealise this thing, madame, even in all its terrible brutality, all its most impure forms, its most monstrous imaginings.
Let us love the caress that thrills as we love the heady vine, ripe fruit fragrant on the palate, and all the sharp pleasures of the body. Let us love flesh because it is beautiful, because it is white and firm, and round and sweet, delicious to lips and hands.
When artists seek the rarest and purest form for the chalice where art must drink to ecstasy they choose the curve of the breasts, whose bud is like a rose.
And in a learned book, called the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, I read this definition of a woman’s bosom, which might have been imagined by M. Joseph Prudhomme turned medical man:
“The breast in woman may be considered as at one and the same time an object of use and of pleasure.”
Let us suppress, if you like it so, the usefulness and keep only the pleasure. Would it have been given this adorable form that calls aloud to be caressed, if it had been designed only to nourish babies?
Yes, madame, leave the moralists to preach modesty, and the doctors caution; leave poets, deceivers that are themselves always deceived, to sing the chaste union of souls and bodiless happiness; leave ugly woman to their duty and rational men to their futile needs; leave doctrinaires to their doctrines, priests to their commandments, and as for us, let us prize more than anything in the world the caress of love, that intoxicates and maddens us, makes us faint and exhausted, and gives us new life, that is sweeter than perfume, lighter than the light wind, sharper than wounds, swift and devouring, that makes men pray and weep and groan and shout and commit any crime and any heroic deed.
Let us love it, with no placid normal legal love; but violently, furiously, beyond all bounds of reason. Let us seek it as men seek gold and diamonds, for it is more precious than they, being beyond price and fleeting. Let us pursue it without faltering, let us die for it and through it.
And let me tell you, madame, a truth that you will not find, I think, in any book; the only happy women on this earth are those to whom no caresses are lacking. These live without anxiety, without torturing thoughts, desiring nothing save the next kiss, that shall be as delightful and satisfying as the last one was.
The other women, in whose lives caresses are few, or unsatisfying or raw, live tormented by a thousand wretched anxieties, by the friction of greed or vanity, and by all the things of life that turn to sorrow.
But women whose lives are filled with caresses, need nothing, desire nothing, regret nothing. They live in a dream, content and smiling, hardly ruffled by what for others would be irreparable disasters, since the caress of love pays all, cures all things, comforts for all.
I could say much more than this. …
These two letters, written on Japanese rice paper, were found in a little Russian leather pocketbook under a prie-Dieu at the Madeleine, on Sunday, yesterday, after one o’clock Mass, by
A Duel
The war was over; the Germans were occupying France; the country lay quivering like a beaten wrestler fallen beneath the conqueror’s knee.
From frenzied, famished, desperate Paris the first trains were departing, going to new frontiers, slowly traversing the countryside and the villages. The first travellers gazed through the windows at the ruined fields and burnt hamlets. At the doors of the houses left standing, Prussian soldiers, wearing their black, brass-spiked helmets, were smoking their pipes, straddling across their chairs. Others were working or talking, as though they were part of the family. When the train went through town, whole regiments could be seen drilling in the squares, and despite the din of the wheels, the hoarse words of command occasionally reached the travellers’ ears.
M. Dubuis, who had been a member of the national guard of Paris throughout the duration of the siege, was on his way to Switzerland to join his wife and children, prudently sent abroad before the invasion.
Hunger and hardships had no whit diminished the rich and peaceable merchant’s stout paunch. He had endured the terrible events with miserable resignation and bitter phrases about the cruelty of man. Now that he was nearing the frontier, the war ended, he was seeing Prussians for the first time, although he had done his duty on the ramparts and mounted guard on many a cold night.
With angry terror he watched these armed and bearded men installed as though in their own homes on the soil of France, and felt in his heart a sort of fever of impotent patriotism, and with it that deep need and new instinct for prudence which has never left us since.
In his
