This man was chaste, this man was a virgin. He had never loved anything save a dream, his dream, his divine dream.
One evening he carried off in his boat a young woman, a great artiste, and begged her to sing. She sang, herself intoxicated by the beauty of the courtyards, by the warm, sweet air, by the fragrance of flowers and by the ecstasy of this young handsome prince.
She sang, as women sing whom love has touched, then, distraught, trembling wildly, she fell on the king’s heart and sought his lips.
But he threw her in the lake, and taking up his oars, gained the shore, without troubling whether she were rescued or not.
Gentlemen of the jury, we have before us a case in all respects similar. I will do no more than read to you now some passages from the diary which we discovered in the drawer of a bureau.
How dull and ugly everything is, always the same, always hideous! How I dream of a lovelier, nobler, more changeful world. How wretched would be the imagination of their God, if their God existed or if he had not created other things as well.
Always woods, little woods, rivers that are like all other rivers, plains like all other plains, all things are alike and monotonous. And man! … Man? … What a horrible animal, wicked, proud and disgusting!
One should love, love madly, without seeing the object of one’s love. For to see is to understand, and to understand is to despise. One should love, intoxicating oneself with the beloved as one gets drunk on wine, in such a way as to lose consciousness of what one is drinking. And drink, drink, drink, without drawing breath, day and night.
I have found her, I think. She has in all her person something ideal that does not seem of this world and lends wings to my dream. Oh, how far otherwise than in reality do people seem to me in my dreams. She is fair, very fair, with hair full of inexpressible delicate shades. Her eyes are blue. Blue eyes are the only ones that ravish my soul. The whole being of a woman, the woman who exists in the depths of my heart, shows itself to me in the eye, only in the eye.
Oh, a mystery! What mystery? The eye? … The whole universe lies therein, because it sees it, because it reflects it. It contains the universe, things and beings, forests and oceans, men and beasts, sunsets, stars, the arts, all, all, it sees, plucks, and bears everything away; and it holds still more, it holds the soul, it holds the thinking man, the man who loves, who laughs, who suffers. Oh, look into the blue eyes of women; they are deep as the sea, changing as the sky, so sweet, so sweet, sweet as gentle winds, sweet as music, sweet as kisses, transparent, so clear that one sees behind, one sees the soul, the blue soul that colours them, that animates them, that makes them divine.
Yes, the soul shares the colours of the glance. Only the blue soul bears the dream in its depths, it has stolen its azure from sea and space.
The eye! Think of it! The eye! It drinks in the visible creation to feed thought. It drinks in the world, colour, movement, books, pictures, all beauty, all ugliness, and creates ideas therefrom. And when it looks at me, it fills me with the sense of a happiness not of this world. It foreshadows to us the things of which we are forever ignorant; it makes us realise that the realities of our thoughts are despicable and filthy things.
I love her too for her manner of walking.
Méme quand l’oiseau marche, on sent qu’il a des ailes,26
the poet said.
When she passes, one feels that she is not of the same race as ordinary women, she is of a finer, more divine race.
I marry her tomorrow. … I am afraid. … I am afraid of so many things.
Two beasts, two dogs, two wolves, two foxes, prowl through the woods and meet. The one is male, the other female. They mate. They mate because of an animal instinct which drives them to continue the race, their race, the race whose form, skin, stature, movements and habits they have.
All beasts do as much, without knowing why!
We too. …
All that I have done in marrying her is to obey this senseless urge that drives us towards the female.
She is my wife. So long as I desired her ideally, she was for me the irrealisable dream on the verge of being realised.
From the very second when I held her in my arms, she was no more than the being of whom nature has made use to bring to naught all my hopes.
Has she brought them to naught? No. Yet I am tired of her, tired of being unable to touch her, to brush her with my hand or my lips, without my heart swelling with an inexpressible disgust, not perhaps disgust with her, but a loftier, wider, more contemptuous disgust, disgust with the embrace of love, so vile as it has become for all refined beings, a shameful act which must be hidden, which is only spoken of in low tones, with blushes. …
I can no longer endure the sight of my wife approaching me, calling to me with smile and glance and arms. I can no longer endure it. I imagined once that her kiss would transport me to the heavens. One day she was suffering from a passing fever, and I caught in her breath the faint subtle almost imperceptible odour of human decay. I was utterly overcome!
Oh! flesh,
