MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

VOLUME TWO

BY

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

THE REALISTS

PRINTED BY

GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA

1897

Chapter XII — Her supple, yielding body shaped itself to mine like wax and took its whole exterior outline as exactly as possible:—water would not have found its way more scrupulously into every irregularity in the line.—Thus glued to my side, she produced the effect of the double stroke that painters give to the shadow side of their picture in laying on their color.

THIS EDITION OF

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED

BY

I. G. BURNHAM

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER LE SUEUR

AND DRAWINGS BY

ÉDOUARD TOUDOUZE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN — VOLUME II
[IN THE RUSTIC CABIN Fronts.]
[D'ALBERT WATCHES THÉODORE]
[AT THE HOTEL DU LION-ROUGE]
[BEFORE THE REHEARSAL]
[AN EMBARRASSING SITUATION]
[AT THE WINDOW OF THE CHATEAU]
[THE DUEL]
[ARRIVAL IN THE TOWN OF C——]
[D'ALBERT'S SURPRISE]
[THE REALIZATION]

IX

That is the fact.—I love a man, Silvio.—I tried for a long while to deceive myself; I gave a different name to the sentiment I felt, I clothed it in the guise of pure, disinterested friendship; I believed that it was nothing more than the admiration I have for all beautiful persons and all beautiful things; I walked for several days through the deceitful, laughing paths that wander about every new-born passion; but I realize now in what a deep and terrible slough I have become involved. There is no way of concealing the truth from myself longer; I have examined myself carefully, I have coolly considered all the circumstances; I have gone to the bottom of the most trivial details; I have searched every corner of my heart with the assurance due to the habit of studying one's self; I blush to think it and to write it; but the fact, alas! is only too certain.—I love this young man, not with the affection of a friend, but with love;—yes, with love.

You, whom I have loved so dearly, Silvio, my dear, my only friend and companion, have never made me feel anything of the sort, and yet, if there ever was under heaven a close, warm friendship, if ever two hearts, although utterly different, understood each other perfectly, ours was that friendship and ours those two hearts. How many swiftly-flying hours have we passed together! what endless conversations, always too soon ended! how many things we have said to each other that no one ever said before!—We had, each in the other's heart, the window that Momus would have opened in man's side. How proud I was to be your friend, although younger than you—I so foolish, you so sensible!

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.

This morning I looked at him for a long while without his seeing me.—I was hidden behind my curtain.—He was at his window which is exactly opposite mine.—This part of the chateau was built toward the close of the reign of Henri IV.; it is half of brick, half of unhewn stone, according to the custom of the time; the window is long and narrow, with stone lintel and a stone balcony.—Théodore—for you have already guessed of course that he is the young man in question—was leaning in a melancholy attitude on the rail, and seemed to be deep in meditation.—Draperies of red damask with large flowers, half drawn aside, fell in broad folds behind him and served as a background.—How beautiful he was, and what a marvellous effect his dark, sallow face produced against the dark red! Two great bunches of hair, black and glossy, like the grape clusters of Erigone of old, fell gracefully along his cheeks and made a charming frame for the pure and delicate oval of his beautiful face. His round, plump neck was entirely bare and he wore a sort of dressing-gown with flowing sleeves not unlike a woman's robe. He held in his hand a yellow tulip, at which he plucked pitilessly in his reverie, throwing the pieces to the wind.

Chapter IX — This morning I looked at him for a long while without his seeing me.—I was hidden behind my curtain.—He was at his window which is exactly opposite mine.—***Théodore—for you have already guessed of course that he is the young man in question—was leaning in a melancholy attitude on the rail, and seemed to be deep in meditation.

One of the shafts of light that the sun projected on the wall cast its reflection on the window, and the picture took on a warm golden tone that the most chatoyant of Giorgione's canvases might have envied.

With that long hair waving gently in the wind, that marble neck thus uncovered, that ample robe enveloping the form, those lovely hands protruding from the sleeves like the pistils of a flower peeping from among their petals, he seemed not the handsomest of men but the loveliest of women,—and I said to myself in my heart: "He is a woman, oh! he is a woman!"—Then I suddenly remembered an absurd thing I wrote to you long ago, you know, about my ideal and the way in which I was surely destined to meet her; the beautiful dame in the Louis XIII. park, the red and white chateau, the terrace, the avenues of old chestnuts and the interview at the window; I gave you all the details before.—And there it was—what I saw was the exact realization of my dream.—There was the style of architecture, the effect of light, the type of beauty, the coloring and the character I had longed for;—nothing was lacking, except that the lady was a man;—but I confess that at that moment I had entirely forgotten that.

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? Our bones, hewn with reaping-hooks and roughly jointed, do not deserve to be swathed in flesh so white and delicate; our battered skulls were not made to be bathed in waves of such lovely hair.

O beauty! we are made only to love thee and adore thee on our knees, if we have found thee—to seek thee incessantly throughout the world, if that happiness has not been vouchsafed us; but to possess thee, to be thou ourselves, is possible only for angels and women. 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.

I once saw a young man who had stolen the bodily form I ought to have had. The villain was just what I would have liked to be. He had the beauty of my ugliness, and beside him I looked like a rough drawing of him. He was of my height, but stronger and more slender; his figure resembled mine, but possessed a refinement and dignity that I have not. His eyes were of the same shade as mine, but they had a sparkle and an animation 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 sculptor; the nostrils were more open and more passionate, the flat surfaces more sharply defined, and it had a heroic cast of which that respectable part of my countenance is entirely devoid. You would have said that nature had tried first to make that perfected myself in my person.—I seemed to be the blotted and unsightly rough draft of the thought of which he was the copy in fine type. When I saw him walk, stop, salute the ladies, sit down and lie down with the perfect grace that results from beautiful proportions, I was seized with such horrible melancholy and jealousy as the clay model must feel as it dries up and cracks in obscurity in a corner of the studio, while the haughty marble statue, which would not exist but for it, stands proudly erect on its carved pedestal and attracts the notice and the enthusiastic praise of visitors. For after all that rascal was simply myself cast a little more successfully and with less unruly bronze that worked itself more carefully into the hollow places of the mould.—I consider him very insolent to strut about thus with my form, and to play the braggart as if he were an original type; at the best, he is simply a plagiarist from me, for I was born before him, and except for me nature would never have had the idea of making him as he is.—When women lauded his good manners and the charms of his person, I had a most intense longing to rise and say to them: "Fools that you are, praise me directly, for this gentleman is myself, and it is a useless circumlocution to send him what comes back to me."—At other times my fingers itched to strangle him and to turn his soul out of that body that belonged to me, and I hovered about him with clenched fists and compressed lips, like a nobleman hovering around his palace, in which a family of beggars have taken up their abode during his absence, perplexed as to the best means of casting them out.—The young man is a stupid creature, by the way, and succeeds so much the better on that account.—And sometimes I envy him his stupidity more than his beauty.—The dictum of the Gospel as to the poor in spirit is not complete: they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven; I know nothing about that, nor do I care; but there is no doubt that they inherit the kingdom of earth—they have money and fair women, that is to say, the only two desirable things in the world.—Do you know a man of spirit who is rich, or a youth of courage and of any sort of merit who has a passable mistress?—Although Théodore is very beautiful, I have never desired his beauty, and I prefer that he should have it, rather than I.

Those strange passions of which the elegies of the ancient poets are full, which used to surprise us so and which we could not conceive, are therefore possible, nay, probable. In the translations we made of them, we used to substitute names of women for the names we found. Juventius was changed to Juventia, Alexis became Ianthe. The comely youths became lovely maidens, and thus we reconstituted the unnatural seraglio of Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and the gentle Virgil. It was a very gallant occupation, which proved simply how little we understood the genius of the ancients.

I am a man of the Homeric days;—the world in which I live is not mine, and I have no comprehension of the society that surrounds me. Christ did not come to earth for me; I am as great a pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.—I have never been to Golgotha to pluck the passion-flowers, and the deep stream that flows from the side of the Crucified One and forms a red girdle around the world has not bathed me in its waves;—my rebellious body refuses to recognize the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh does not understand why it should be mortified.—To me the earth is as fair as heaven, and I think that the correction of physical form is virtue. 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; or deputations of maidens crowned with fillets, with tunics with straight folds and ivory citterns, who seem to wind about an enormous vase.—There is never any mist or haze, anything indistinct or uncertain. 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. The slightest detail acquires substance and becomes boldly accentuated; every object assumes robust shape and color. There is no place for the tameness and reverie of Christian art.—That world is mine.—The brooks in my landscapes fall in carved streams from a carved urn; between those tall, green reeds, as resonant as those of Eurotas, you see the gleam of the rounded, silvery hip of some naiad with sea-green hair. In yonder dark oak forest Diana passes, her quiver on her back, with her flying scarf and her buskins with interlaced bands. She is followed by her pack and her nymphs with the melodious names.—My pictures are painted in four tones like those of the primitive painters, and often they are only colored bas-reliefs; for I love to put my finger on what I have seen and to follow the curve of the contours into its deepest recesses; I consider everything from every point of view and walk around it with a light in my hand.—I have contemplated love in the old-fashioned light, as a bit of sculpture more or less perfect. How is the arm? Not bad.—The hands do not lack delicacy.—What think you of that foot? I think that the ankle has no nobility, and that the heel is commonplace. But the neck is well placed and well shaped, the curved lines are wavy enough, the shoulders are plump and well modelled.—The woman would make a passable model and several portions of her would bear to be cast.—Let us love her.

I have always been like this. For women I have the glance of a sculptor, not that of a lover. I have been anxious all my life about the shape of the decanter, never about the quality of its contents. If I had had Pandora's box in my hands, I believe I never should have opened it. I said just now that Christ did not come to earth for me; nor did Mary, the star of the modern Heaven, the gentle mother of the glorious Babe.

Often and long have I stood beneath the stone foliage of cathedrals, in the uncertain light from the stained-glass windows, at the hour when the organ moaned of itself, when an invisible finger was placed upon the keys and the wind blew through the pipes,—and I have buried my eyes deep in the pale azure of the Madonna's sorrowful eyes. I have followed piously the emaciated outline of her face, the faintly-marked arch of her eyebrows; I have admired her smooth, luminous forehead, her chastely transparent temples, her cheek bones tinged with a dark, maidenly flush, more delicate than the peach bloom; I have counted one by one the lovely golden lashes that cast their trembling shadow on her cheeks; I have distinguished, in the half-light in which she is bathed, the fleeting outlines of her slender, modestly bent neck; I have even, with audacious hand, raised the folds of her tunic and seen without a veil that virgin bosom, swollen with milk, that was never pressed by any save divine lips; I have followed the tiny blue veins in their most imperceptible ramifications, I have placed my finger upon them to force the celestial fluid to gush forth in white threads; I have brushed with my lips the bud of the mystic rose.

Ah well! I confess that all that immaterial beauty, so fleet-winged and so vaporous that one feels that it will soon take flight, made a very slight impression on me.—I like the Venus Anadyomene better, a thousand times better.—The antique eyes, turned up at the comers, the pure, sharply-cut lip, so amorous and so well adapted to be kissed, the full, low forehead, the hair, wavy as the sea, and knotted carelessly behind the head, the firm, lustrous shoulders, the back with its thousand charming sinuosities, the small, closely-united breasts, all the rounded, tense outlines, the broad hips, the delicate strength, the evident superhuman vigor in a body so adorably feminine, delight me and enchant me to a degree of which you, the Christian and the virtuous man, can form no idea.

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. I am jealous of those tall virile angels, with floating hair and robes, who so amorously crowd about her in the pictures of the Assumption; the hands clasped together to support her, the wings fluttering to fan her, displease and annoy me. Those dandies of heaven, coquettish, over-bearing youngsters, in tunics of light and wigs of gold thread, with their beautiful blue and green feathers, seem to me too gallant by far, and if I were God, I would be careful how I gave my mistress such pages.

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; she conceals nothing, for modesty was invented only for the ugly, it is a modern invention, the offspring of Christian contempt for form and matter.

O old world! all that thou didst revere is despised; thy idols are overthrown in the dust; emaciated anchorites, dressed in rags and tatters, bleeding martyrs, their shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched upon the pedestals of thy beautiful, charming gods;—Christ has enveloped the world in His shroud. 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. A dark, lugubrious thought alone fills the immense void.—Cleomenes is going to the weavers' shops to see what folds the cloth or linen takes.

Virginity, thou bitter weed, born in soil drenched with blood, whose blanched and sickly flower blossoms painfully in the damp shade of cloisters, beneath a cold shower of lustral water;—thou rose without perfume, bristling with thorns, thou hast replaced for us the lovely, joyous roses, bathed in spikenard and Falernian, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!

The ancient world knew naught of thee, unfruitful flower; thou didst never form a part of its wreaths whose perfume intoxicated;—in that lusty, healthy society thou wouldst have been disdainfully trodden under foot.—Virginity, mysticism, melancholy—three unknown words—three new diseases, brought to earth by Christ.—Ye pallid spectres, who inundate our world with your frozen tears, and who, with your elbows on a cloud and your hands on your breasts, can say nothing but "O death! O death!" ye could never have stepped foot upon that earth, peopled with indulgent, madcap gods!

I look upon woman, after the ancient fashion, as a beautiful slave destined to minister to our pleasures.—Christianity has not rehabilitated her in my eyes. To me she is still something dissimilar and inferior to us, whom we adore and with whom we toy, a plaything more intelligent than if it were made of ivory or gold, and having the power to pick itself up if it is dropped on the ground.—I have been told, because of that, that I have a low opinion of women; it seems to me, on the contrary, to show that I have a very high opinion of them.

Upon my word I cannot see why women are so eager to be looked upon as men.—I can understand that they might long to be boa-constrictors, lions or elephants, but that they should long to be men passes my comprehension. If I had been at the Council of Trent when this important question was discussed, namely, whether woman is a man, I should most certainly have given my opinion in the negative.

I have in the course of my life written some amorous verses, or at all events some that claimed to be so considered.—I have just read over a part of them. The modern idea of love is absolutely lacking.—If they were written in Latin distiches instead of in French rhymes, they might be taken for the work of a wretched poet of Augustus's time. And I am amazed that the women, for whom they were written, did not take serious offence at them instead of being charmed with them.—To be sure, women understand no more about poetry than cabbages and roses, which is very natural and simple, they being themselves poetry, or at least the best instruments of poetry: the flute does not hear or understand the tune that you play upon it.

In these poems I speak of nothing but golden or ebon locks, the miraculous fineness of the skin, the roundness of the arm, the small size of the feet and the refined shape of the hand, and they all end with an humble entreaty to the divinity to accord as speedily as possible the enjoyment of all those beautiful things.—In the finest passages, there is naught but garlands suspended at the door, showers of roses, incense, a succession of Catullian kisses, delicious, sleepless nights, quarrels with Aurora coupled with injunctions to the aforesaid Aurora to withdraw behind old Tithonus's saffron-colored curtains;—there is splendor without heat, resonance without vibration.—They are rhythmical, polished, written with sustained interest; but, through all the refinements and veils of expression, you can feel the sharp, stern voice of the master trying to assume a softer tone in speaking to the slave.—Not, as in the erotic poems written since the Christian era, does a heart ask another heart to love it, because it loves; there is no smiling, azure lake inviting a brook to plunge into its bosom that they may reflect together the stars of heaven; no pair of doves spreading their wings at the same time to fly to the same nest.

Cynthia, you are fair; make haste. Who knows if you will be alive to-morrow?—Your hair is blacker than the lustrous flesh of an Ethiopian maiden. 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. Wait until Saturn has furrowed with his nail that pure and gleaming brow, and you will see how your threshold, now so besieged, so implored, so covered with flowers and so wet with tears, will be avoided, accursed and covered with weeds and nettles.—Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may serve as a grave for the greatest love.

That brutal, imperious formula summarizes the ancient elegy; it constantly comes back to that; that is its main argument, the strongest, the Achilles of its arguments. After that it hasn't very much to say, and when it has promised a robe of byssus of two colors and a string of pearls of equal size, it is at the end of its tether.—It also includes almost all of what I find most conclusive under such circumstances.—I do not, however, always confine myself to this somewhat restricted programme, and I embroider my poor canvas with a few threads of silk of different colors, picked up here and there. But these threads are short or knotted together twenty times and do not cling firmly to the woof. I speak politely of love because I have read many beautiful things on the subject. Only an actor's talent is needed for that. With many women this external appearance is enough; the habit of writing and using the imagination prevents me from falling short in such matters, and every mind at all experienced, by applying itself to the task, can readily attain that result; but I do not feel a word of what I say, and I keep repeating, in an undertone, with the poet of old: "Cynthia, make haste."

I have often been accused of being a knave and a pretender.—No one on earth would like so well as I to speak freely and to empty his heart!—but as I have no idea or sentiment in common with the people about me,—as there would be a hurrah and a general hue and cry at the first true word I spoke, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if I speak, to give utterance only to idiotic remarks that are received everywhere and entitled to privilege of citizenship.—I should receive a warm welcome if I said to women such things as I have just written to you! I fancy that they wouldn't much relish my way of looking at things or the view I take of love.—As for the men, I cannot tell them to their faces that they are wrong not to walk on four legs; and in truth I have a more favorable opinion of them.—I have no desire to quarrel at every word. What difference does it make after all what I think or what I don't think? that I am sad when I seem cheerful, cheerful when I have an air of melancholy! No-body is inclined to cry out at me because I don't go about naked; may I not dress my face as well as my body? Why should a mask be more reprehensible than a pair of breeches, and a lie than a corset?

Alas! the earth revolves about the sun, roasted on one side, frozen on the other. There is a battle in which six hundred thousand men cut and slash at one another; it is the loveliest day imaginable; the flowers are coquettish beyond words and boldly throw open their gorgeous breasts even under the horses' feet. To-day a fabulous number of worthy deeds are done; it rains in torrents, there is snow and thunder and lightning and hail; one would say that the world was coming to an end. The benefactors of humanity are covered with mud up to their middle like dogs, unless they have a carriage. Creation mocks pitilessly at the creature and lets fly stinging sarcasms at every turn. Everybody is indifferent to everybody else, and everything lives or vegetates according to its own law. Whether I do this or that, whether I live or die, whether I suffer or enjoy, whether I dissemble or speak frankly, what matters it to the sun or the turnips or even to mankind? A wisp of straw fell on an ant and broke his third leg at the second joint; a rock fell upon a village and crushed it; I do not believe that one of those disasters brings more tears than the other to the golden eyes of the stars. You are my best friend, if that word is not as hollow as a bell; if I should die, it is perfectly certain that, however distressed you might be, you wouldn't go without your dinner even for two days, and that, notwithstanding that terrible catastrophe, you would continue to enjoy your game of backgammon.—Who of my friends, who of my mistresses will remember my names and baptismal names twenty years hence, and who would recognize me in the street, if I should pass by with a coat that was out at the elbows?—Oblivion and annihilation, that is the end of man.

I feel as utterly alone as possible, and all the threads that lead from me to external things and from them to me have broken one by one. There have been few instances where a man who has retained the power to judge his impulses has reached such a degree of brutishness. I resemble a decanter of liquor which has been left uncorked and from which the spirit has evaporated completely. The liquid has the same appearance and the same color; taste it, you will find it as insipid as water.

When I think of it I stand aghast at the rapidity of this decomposition; if this continues I must pickle myself or I shall inevitably rot, and the worms will attack me, as I no longer have a soul, and that alone marks the distinction between a body and a corpse.—Not more than a year ago I still had something human about me;—I moved about and sought enlightenment. I had one thought that I cherished more than all the rest, a sort of goal, an ideal; I longed to be loved, I dreamed the dreams common to youths of that age,—less vague, less chaste, to be sure, than those of ordinary young men, but contained nevertheless within reasonable bounds. Gradually all the incorporeal part of me became detached and faded away and naught remained at the bottom but a thick layer of coarse slime. The dream became a nightmare and the chimera a succubus;—the world of the soul closed its ivory doors in my face; I no longer understand anything except what I touch with my hands; I have dreams of stone; everything condenses and hardens about me, nothing wavers, nothing vacillates, there is no air or breath; matter weighs me down, takes possession of me, crushes me; I am like a pilgrim who should fall asleep on a summer's day with his feet in the water, and wake in winter with his legs caught and embedded in the ice. I no longer desire the love or friendship of any one; even glory, that resplendent halo that I so craved for my brow, no longer arouses the slightest desire in my mind. There is but one thing, alas! that stirs my pulses now, and that is the horrible desire that draws me toward Théodore.—This is the sum of all my moral notions. Whatever is physically beautiful is good, whatever is ugly is bad.—If I should see a lovely woman whom I knew to be the wickedest creature on earth, adulteress and poisoner, I confess that it would make no difference to me and would in no wise interfere with my taking delight in her, if I found the shape of her nose what it should be.

This is my idea of supreme happiness:—A large square building with no outside windows: a large court-yard, surrounded by a colonnade of white marble, a crystal fountain in the centre with a jet of quicksilver after the Arabian fashion, orange-trees and pomegranates in boxes, arranged alternately; overhead a deep blue sky and a bright yellow sun;—tall greyhounds with pointed muzzles would lie sleeping here and there; from time to time barefooted negroes with gold ringlets about their legs, and beautiful, slender white maid-servants, dressed in rich and fanciful costumes, would pass in and out under the arches, baskets on their arms or jugs on their heads. And I should be seated, silent and motionless, beneath a magnificent canopy, surrounded by piles of cushions, a great tame lion under my elbow, the bare breast of a young female slave under my foot by way of hassock, and smoking opium in a long jade pipe.

I cannot imagine paradise in any other form; and if God wills that I shall go there after my death, he will build me a little kiosk on that plan in the corner of some star.—Paradise as it is commonly described seems to me far too musical, and I confess in all humility that I am absolutely incapable of sitting through a sonata that should last only ten thousand years.

You see what my Eldorado is, my promised land; it is as good a dream as another; but it has this special peculiarity, that I never introduce any known face into it; that no one of my friends ever crossed the threshold of that imaginary palace; that no one of the women I have had has ever been seated beside me on the velvet cushions: I am always alone there in the midst of apparitions. I have never had an idea of loving all the female figures, all the lovely shades of young girls with which I people it; I have never fancied one of them in love with me.—In that seraglio of my fantasy, I have created no favorite sultana. There are negresses there, mulattresses, Jewesses with blue skin and red hair, Greeks and Circassians, Spaniards and Englishwomen; but they are to me simply symbols of coloring and feature, and I have them as one has all sorts of wine in his cellar and all species of humming-birds in his collection. They are pleasure machines, pictures that need no frame, statues that come to you when you have a fancy to look at them nearer at hand and call them. A woman has this incontestable advantage over a statue, that she turns of herself in whatever direction you choose, whereas you must make the circuit of the statue and station yourself where the best view is to be had—which is tiresome.

You must see that with such ideas I cannot remain in these times or in this world; for one cannot exist thus without regard to time and space. I must find something else.

Such a conclusion is the simple and logical result of such thoughts.—When one seeks only the gratification of the eye, symmetry of figure and purity of feature, one accepts them wherever he finds them. This explains the extraordinary aberrations of love among the ancients.

Since the days of Christ there has not been a single statue of man in which youthful beauty was idealized and reproduced with the care that characterizes the ancient sculptors.—Woman has become the symbol of moral and physical beauty: man has really been dethroned since the day the child was born at Bethlehem. Woman is the queen of creation; the stars join to form a crown for her head, the crescent moon deems it an honor to form a cradle for her foot, the sun gives her his purest gold to make trinkets, painters who wish to flatter the angels give them the features of women, and far be it from me to blame them for it.—Before the coming of the sweet-tempered, courteous dealer in parables, it was very different; men did not feminize the gods or heroes whom they wished to make seductive; they had their type, at once sturdy and delicate, but always masculine, however amorous the outlines, however smooth and devoid of muscles and veins the workmen may have made their divine legs and arms. They readily made the special beauties of women consistent with this type. They broadened the shoulders, they lessened the size of the hips, they gave more prominence to the breast, they accentuated more strongly the joints of the arms and thighs.—There is almost no difference between Paris and Helen. Wherefore the hermaphrodite was one of the most ardently-cherished chimeras of the ancient idolatry.

That son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in very truth, one of the most attractive creations of pagan genius. It is impossible to imagine anything more ravishingly beautiful than those two bodies, both perfect, harmoniously melted together, those two types of beauty, so equal yet so different, which unite to form one that is superior to either, because they mutually soften each other and bring out each the other's good points: to one who adores form exclusively, can there be a more pleasing uncertainty than that due to the sight of that back, those doubtful loins, those legs, so strong and slender that you are in doubt whether they should be attributed to Mercury on the point of taking flight or Diana coming from the bath? The trunk is a combination of the most charming singularities; above the full round chest of the lusty youth rises with strange grace the swelling breast of a young virgin. Beneath the sides, well wrapped in flesh and feminine in their softness, you divine the muscles and the ribs, as in the sides of a young man; the stomach is a little flat for a woman, a little round for a man, and there is something vague and indecisive about the whole character of the body, which it is impossible to describe and which has a charm all its own.—Théodore would surely be a most excellent model of that kind of beauty; it seems to me, however, that in him the feminine element carries the day and that he has retained more of Salmacis than the Hermaphrodite of the Metamorphoses.

The strange part of it all is that I hardly think of his sex now, and that I love him with a sense of perfect security. Sometimes I try to persuade myself that this love is an abomination, and I tell myself so in the harshest possible way; but it comes only from the lips, it is an argument that I urge upon myself and fail to appreciate; it really seems to me that it is the simplest thing in the world and that any other in my place would do the same.

I look at him, I listen to him talk or sing—for he sings admirably—and I take an indescribable pleasure in it.—He seems to me so much like a woman that one day, in the heat of conversation, I called him madame inadvertently, whereat he laughed, and it seemed to me a decidedly forced laugh.

But if he is a woman, what can be his motive for masquerading thus? I cannot answer the question in any way. That a very young, very handsome and perfectly beardless youth should disguise himself as a woman might be conceived; in that way he would open a thousand doors that would otherwise remain obstinately closed to him, and the jest might lead him into a complication of adventures thoroughly Dædalian and enjoyable. In that way one can gain access to a woman who is closely guarded or carry a citadel by storm under cover of a surprise. But I cannot understand what advantage can accrue to a young and beautiful woman from travelling around the country in male attire: she can only lose by it. A woman is not likely to renounce thus the pleasure of being courted, flattered and adored; she would renounce life rather, and she would do wisely, for what is a woman's life without all that?—Nothing—or something worse than death. And I always wonder that women who are thirty years old, or have the small-pox, don't jump from the top of a steeple.

Notwithstanding all that, something stronger than all arguments cries out to me that he is a woman, and that she is the woman I have dreamed of, whom alone I am to love, and who is to love me alone;—yes, it is she, the goddess with the eagle glance, with the fair royal hands, who smiled condescendingly upon me from her seat on her throne of clouds. She has presented herself to me in this disguise to put me to the test, to see if I would recognize her, if my amorous gaze would penetrate the veils in which she has enveloped herself, as in the marvellous tales where fairies appear at first in the guise of beggars, then suddenly stand forth resplendent in gold and jewels.

I have recognized you, oh! my love! At sight of you my heart leaped in my breast as Saint-Jean leaped in the breast of Sainte-Anne, when she was visited by the Virgin; the air was filled with a blaze of light; I smelt the odor of divine ambrosia; I saw the train of fire at your feet, and I understood at once that you were not an ordinary mortal.

The melodious notes of Sainte-Cecilia's viol, to which the angels listened with delight, are hoarse and discordant compared with the pearly cadences that issue from your ruby lips; the youthful, smiling Graces dance incessantly about you; the birds, when you pass through the woods, murmur as they bend their little feathered heads in order to see you more clearly, and whistle their sweetest refrains to you; the amorous moon rises earlier to kiss you with her pale silver lips, for she has abandoned her shepherd for you; the wind is careful not to efface the delicate print of your dainty foot upon the sand; the fountain, when you lean over it, becomes smoother than crystal, for fear of wrinkling and disturbing the reflection of your celestial face; even the modest violets open their little hearts to you, and play countless little coquettish tricks from before you; the jealous strawberry is stung to emulation and strives to equal the divine carnation of your lips; the infinitesimal gnat hums joyously and applauds you by flapping his wings;—all nature loves and admires you, its loveliest work!

Ah! now I live!—hitherto I had been no better than a dead man: now I have thrown off my shroud, and I stretch out my two thin hands from the grave toward the sun; my blue spectre-like color has left me. My blood flows swiftly through my veins. The ghastly silence that reigned about me is broken at last. The black, opaque arch that weighed upon my brow is lighted up. A thousand mysterious voices whisper in my ear; lovely stars sparkle above me and carpet the windings of my path with their gold spangles; the marguerites smile sweetly on me and the bells tinkle my name with their little twisted tongues. I understand a multitude of things that I used not to understand, I discover marvellous affinities and sympathies, I know the language of the roses and the nightingales, and I can read fluently the book I could not even spell. I have discovered that I have a friend in yonder respectable old oak, covered with mistletoe and parasitic plants, and that the frail and languorous periwinkle, whose great blue eye is always overflowing with tears, has long cherished a secret, discreet passion for me:—it is love, it is love that has unsealed my eyes and given me the key to the enigma.—Love descended into the depths of the cavern where my cowering, drowsy soul was freezing to death; he took it by the hand and led it up the steep and narrow stairway to the outer world. All the doors of the prison were burst open and for the first time the poor Psyche came forth from the me in which she was confined.

Another life has become mine. I breathe through another's lungs, and the blow that should wound him would kill me.—Before this happy day I was like those stupid Japanese idols who are forever looking at their stomach. I was the spectator of myself, the pit at the comedy. I was acting; I watched myself live and listened to the beating of my heart as to the oscillations of a pendulum. That is the whole story. Images were reproduced in my distraught eyes; sounds fell upon my unheeding ear, but nothing from the outer world reached my soul. Nobody's existence was essential to me; indeed I doubted if there were any other existence than mine, nor was I quite sure even of that. It seemed to me that I was alone in the midst of the universe, and that all the rest was only smoke, images, vain illusions, fleeting apparitions destined to people that void.—What a difference!

And yet, what if my presentiment had misled me, if Théodore should prove to be in truth a man, as everybody believes him to be! Such marvellous beauty has sometimes been seen in man; extreme youth may assist the illusion.—It is something I will not think about, for it would drive me mad; the grain that fell yesterday into my sterile heart has already penetrated it, in every direction, with its thousand filaments; it has taken a strong hold there and it would be impossible for me to tear it out. It has already become a green and flourishing tree and its knotted roots have struck deep.—If I should be convinced beyond a doubt that Théodore is not a woman, alas! I cannot say that I should not love him still.

X

You were very wise, my sweet friend, to try and dissuade me from the plan I had conceived of seeing men near at hand, of studying them closely, before giving my heart to any one of them.—I have extinguished love, yes, even the possibility of love, within me forever.

What poor creatures we girls are; brought up with so much care, surrounded by a triple wall of virginal precautions and reticence;—allowed to hear nothing, to suspect nothing, our principal knowledge being to know nothing, in what strange misconceptions do we pass our lives and what deceitful chimeras lull us to sleep in their arms!

Ah! Graciosa, thrice accursed be the moment when the idea of this travesty first occurred to me; what horrors, what infamous vulgarity I have been compelled to witness or to listen to! what a treasure of chaste and priceless ignorance I have squandered in a short time!

It was a lovely moonlight night, do you remember? when we walked together at the foot of the garden, in that gloomy, unfrequented path, terminated at one end by a statue of a Faun playing the flute, a Faun without a nose and covered with a thick leprosy of greenish-black moss—and at the other end by an imitation vista drawn on the wall and half washed away by the rain.—Through the still sparse foliage of the elms we could see the twinkling stars and the curve of the silver sickle. The odor of young shoots and fresh flowers came to our nostrils from the flower-beds, borne upon the languid breath of a faint breeze; an invisible bird warbled a strange, languorous tune; we, like true girls, talked of love and lovers, of the handsome cavalier we had seen at mass; we shared the few notions of the world and of things that we had in our heads; we twisted and turned in a hundred ways a phrase we had heard by chance, the meaning of which seemed to us obscure and strange; we asked each other a thousand of the silly questions that the most perfect innocence alone can imagine.—What primitive poesy, what adorable nonsense in those furtive interviews of two little fools fresh from boarding-school!

You wanted for your lover a gallant, proud young man, with black hair and moustaches, long spurs, long plumes, and a long sword—a sort of amorous Hector—and you were all for the heroic and triumphant; you dreamed of nothing but duels and escalades, and marvellous devotion, and you would readily have thrown your glove in among the lions so that your Esplandian might go and pick it up. It was very comical to see a little girl as you were then, fair-haired and blushing, bending in the slightest breeze, declaim those noble tirades without taking breath, and with the most martial air imaginable.

I, although I was only six months older than you, was six years less romantic; the thing that interested me most was to know what men said among themselves and what they did when they went away from salons and theatres:—I felt that there were many dark, unsavory corners in their lives, carefully concealed from our eyes, which it was most important for us to know about. Sometimes, hiding behind a curtain, I watched from a distance the young gentlemen who came to the house, and it seemed to me at such times that I could detect something cynical and mean in their bearing, vulgar indifference or discourteous preoccupation which I no longer noticed when they had been admitted, and which they seemed to lay aside as if by enchantment at the threshold of the salon. All of them, young and old alike, seemed to me to have adopted a uniform conventional mask, conventional sentiments, and a conventional mode of speech, when they were in the presence of women.—From the corner of the salon where I sat up straight as a doll, my back not touching the back of my chair, pulling my bouquet to pieces in my fingers, I looked and listened; my eyes were cast down, and yet I saw everything to right and left, before and behind me:—like the fabulous eyes of the lynx, my eyes looked through walls, and I could have told what was taking place in the adjoining room.

I had also noticed a notable difference in the way they spoke to married women; there were none of the discreet, polite, playfully-childish sentences such as they addressed to me or my companions, but a more flippant sportiveness, less grave and more familiar manners, the significant reticence and circumlocutions that follow quickly from a corrupt nature that knows it has one similarly corrupt before it; I felt that there was an element of union between them that did not exist between us, and I would have given everything to know what that element was.

With what anxiety and frenzied curiosity did I follow with eye and ear the buzzing, laughing groups of young men who, after breaking through the circle at a few points, resumed their promenade, talking together and casting ambiguous glances as they passed. Incredulous sneering smiles flickered about their full lips; they had the appearance of laughing at what they had said and of retracting the compliments and words of adoration with which they had overwhelmed us. I did not hear their words; but I understood, from the movement of their lips, that they were talking a language that was unknown to me and that no one had ever used before me. Even those who had the most humble and submissive manner tossed their heads with very perceptible indications of ennui and rebellion;—a panting sound, like that made by an actor when he reaches the end of a long speech, escaped from their lungs in spite of them, and they would half turn on their heels as they left us, in an eager, hurried way that denoted inward satisfaction at being relieved from the severe task of being courteous and gallant.

I would have given a year of my life to listen, unseen, to one hour of their conversation. I frequently understood from certain attitudes, from an occasional gesture or an oblique glance in my direction, that I was the subject of conversation among them and that they were discussing either my age or my face. At such times I was on burning coals; the few indistinct words, the fragments of phrases that reached my ears at intervals, excited my curiosity to the highest pitch but could not satisfy it, and I fell into strange doubts and perplexities.

Generally what they said seemed to be favorable, and it was not that that disturbed me: I cared very little whether they thought I was beautiful; but the brief remarks whispered in the ear and almost always followed by long laughter and significant winks—those were what I would have liked to know about; and for one of those sentences spoken in an undertone behind a curtain or in the angle of a door, I would without regret have interrupted the sweetest and most delightful conversation in the world.

If I had had a lover, I would have liked much to know how he would have spoken of me to another man, and in what terms he would have boasted of his good fortune to his boon companions, with a little wine in his head and both elbows on the table.

I know now and in truth I am very sorry to know.—It is always so.

My idea was a mad one, but what is done is done and one cannot unlearn what one has learned. I did not listen to you, my dear Graciosa, and I am sorry for it; but one doesn't always listen to reason, especially when it issues from such a pretty mouth as yours, for, I don't know why it is, but one cannot believe that advice is good unless it is given by some old bald or gray head, as if having been a fool for sixty years could make you wise.

But all this tormented me too much, and I couldn't stand it; I was broiling in my little skin like a chestnut on the stove. The fatal apple was ripening in the foliage above my head, and I must needs bite into it at last, being at liberty to throw it away afterwards, if it seemed to me to have a bitter taste.

I did like fair-haired Eve, my dearest grandmother—I bit.

The death of my uncle, my only remaining kinsman, leaving me in control of my actions, I carried out the plan I had so long dreamed of.—My precautions were taken with the greatest care so that no one should suspect my sex: I had learned to use the sword and pistol; I was a perfect horsewoman and daring to a point that few equerries could equal; I made a careful study of the proper way of wearing a cloak and brandishing a crop, and in the course of a few months I succeeded in transforming a girl who was considered very pretty, into a youth who was much prettier and who lacked almost nothing except a moustache,—I turned what property I had into cash, and left the town, resolved not to return until I had acquired thorough experience.

It was the only way of solving my doubts: to have lovers would have taught me nothing, or at least it would only have afforded me incomplete information, and I wanted to study man thoroughly, to dissect him fibre by fibre with an inexorable scalpel, and to watch him, alive and palpitating, on my dissecting-table; for that, it was necessary to see him alone in his own house, off his guard, to go with him to walk, to the tavern and elsewhere.—With my disguise I could go everywhere without being noticed; no one would conceal his true character before me, all constraint and reserve would be laid aside, I should receive confidences—I would make false ones in order to receive true ones in return. Alas! women have read only the romance of man, never his history.

It is a terrifying thing to think of—a thing we do not think of—how profoundly ignorant we are of the life and conduct of those who seem to love us and whom we marry. Their real existence is as absolutely unknown to us as if they were inhabitants of Saturn or some other planet a hundred million leagues from our sublunary ball; you would say that they were of another species, and that there is not the least intellectual bond between the two sexes;—the virtues of one make the vices of the other, and the things that a man admires make a woman blush.

Our lives are transparent and may be penetrated at a glance.—It is easy to follow us from the house to the boarding-school, from the boarding-school back to the house;—what we do is a mystery to no one; every one can see our wretched crayon drawings, our bouquets in water-color, consisting of a pansy and a rose of the size of a cabbage, sweetly tied together by the stems with a bow of delicate-hued ribbon; the slippers we embroider for our father's or grandfather's birthday have nothing in themselves very occult or very disquieting.—Our sonatas and our romanzas are executed with all desirable lack of warmth. We are well and duly tied to our mother's apron-strings, and at nine o'clock, or ten at the latest, we go to our little white beds in our clean and virtuous little cells, where we are scrupulously bolted and padlocked in until the next morning. The most alert and most jealous sensitiveness could find nothing objectionable in that.

The clearest crystal is not so transparent as such a life.

The man who takes us knows what we have done from the moment we were weaned and even before, if he cares to carry his investigations so far.—Our life is not life, it is a sort of vegetating existence like that of moss and flowers; the freezing shadow of the maternal stalk hovers around us, poor, dwarfed rose-buds, who dare not open. Our principal business is to sit very straight, tightly laced and whaleboned, with our eyes properly downcast, and to outdo, in immobility and stiffness, mannikins and dolls on springs.

We are forbidden to speak, to join in the conversation farther than to answer yes and no if we are questioned. As soon as anything interesting is to be said we are sent away to practise on the harp or spinet, and our music masters are always at least sixty years old and take snuff disgustingly. The models hung in our rooms are anatomically very vague and evasive. The Greek gods, before making their appearance in young ladies' boarding-schools, take care to purchase very full box-coats at a second-hand clothing shop, and to be engraved in stipple, which makes them look like porters or cab-drivers and renders them but ill-adapted to excite our imaginations.

By dint of seeking to prevent us from becoming romantic, they make us idiots. The time when we are being educated is passed, not in teaching us something, but in preventing us from learning anything.

We are really prisoners, in body and mind; but a young man, free to do what he will, who goes out in the morning not to return until the next morning, who has money, who can earn money and dispose of it as he pleases—how could he justify his method of employing his time?—who is the man who would be willing to tell his beloved what he has done during the day and night?—Not one, even of those who are reputed the purest.

I sent my horse and my clothes to a little farm that I own at some distance from the town. I dressed myself, mounted and rode away, not without a strange oppression at the heart.—I regretted nothing, I left nothing behind, neither relatives nor friends, not a dog, not a cat, and yet I was sad, I almost had tears in my eyes; the farm, which I had never visited more than five or six times, had no sentimental attraction for me, and there was none of the fondness you sometimes feel for certain spots, which saddens you when you are obliged to leave them; but I turned two or three times to watch the spiral column of bluish smoke rising among the trees.

There I had left my title of woman, with my skirts and petticoats; in the chamber in which I had dressed were confined twenty years of my life, which were no longer to count and no longer concerned me. On the door might have been written:—"Here lies Madelaine de Maupin;"—for I was no longer Madelaine de Maupin, but Théodore de Sérannes,—and no one was to call me again by the sweet name of Madelaine.

The drawer in which my dresses, useless thenceforth, were placed, seemed to me like the coffin of my maidenly illusions;—I was a man, or at least I had the appearance of one; the maiden was dead.

When I had altogether lost sight of the tops of the chestnut-trees that surrounded the farm, it seemed to me that I was no longer myself but another, and I remembered my former acts as those of a stranger whom I had watched, or as the beginning of a novel which I had not finished reading.

I recalled complacently a thousand little details, whose childish innocence brought to my lips an indulgent smile, sometimes a little mocking, like that of a young rake listening to the Arcadian, pastoral confidences of a school-boy of thirteen; and, at the moment I was parting from them forever, all my girlish and young-womanish follies flocked to the roadside, making friendly gestures to me and sending me kisses with the tips of their white, tapering fingers.

I put spurs to my horse to fly from this enervating emotion; the trees flew swiftly by on the right hand and the left; but the madcap swarm, buzzing louder than a swarm of bees, rushed along the paths beside the road, calling: "Madelaine! Madelaine!"

I struck my horse a sharp blow on the neck which made him double his speed. My hair stood out almost straight behind my head, my cloak was in a horizontal position, as if the folds had been carved out of stone, our pace was so swift; I looked back once and saw, like a tiny white cloud far away on the horizon, the dust that my horse's feet had raised.

I stopped a moment.

In an eglantine bush, on the edge of the road, I saw something white moving, and a voice, clear and soft as silver, struck my ear:—"Madelaine, Madelaine, where are you going so far from home, Madelaine? I am your virginity, my dear child; that is why I have a white dress, a white crown and a white skin. But why do you wear boots, Madelaine? I thought that you had a very pretty foot. Boots and short-clothes and a great plumed hat like a cavalier going to the war! Why that long sword that strikes and bruises your thigh? You have a strange outfit, Madelaine, and I am not sure if I ought to accompany you."

"If you are afraid, my dear, go back to the house, water my flowers and take care of my doves. But really you are wrong, you would be safer in these garments of stout cloth than in your gauze and fine linen. My boots prevent any one from seeing if I have a pretty foot; this sword is to defend myself and the plume waving in my hat is to frighten away the nightingales that come to sing false songs of love in my ear."

I continued my journey; in the sighs of the wind I thought I could recognize the last bar of the sonata I had learned for my uncle's birthday, and in a great rose that showed its full-blown head above a low wall, the model of the rose I had painted so often in water-colors; as I rode by a house I saw the phantoms of my curtains waving at a window. My whole past seemed to be clinging to me to prevent my going forward and arriving at a new future.

I hesitated two or three times, and I turned my horse's head the other way.

But the little blue snake, curiosity, softly hissed insidious words into my ear, and said to me:—"Go on, go on, Théodore; it is a good opportunity to learn; if you don't learn to-day, you will never know.—And will you bestow your noble heart, at random, on the first honest and passionate exterior?—Men conceal some very extraordinary secrets from us, Théodore!"

I started off at a gallop.

The short-clothes were on my body and not in my mind; I had a very unpleasant feeling, a sort of shiver of fear, to call it by its right name, at a dark place in the forest; a gunshot, fired by a poacher, almost made me faint. If it had been a highwayman, the pistols in my holsters and my long sword would certainly have been of small use to me. But gradually I recovered and paid no farther attention to it.

The sun sank slowly beneath the horizon like the lights in a theatre which are turned down when the performance is at an end. Rabbits and pheasants crossed the road from time to time; the shadows lengthened and all distant objects were tinged with red. Certain parts of the sky were of a most soft, deep lilac, others of a pale lemon or orange; the birds of night began to sing, and a multitude of curious sounds arose from the woods: the little remaining light faded away, and it became quite dark,—darker because of the shadow cast by the trees. And I, who had never been out alone at night, was in the midst of a great forest at eight o'clock! Can you imagine it, my Graciosa,—I who used almost to die of fear at the foot of the garden? My fright returned with ten-fold force and my heart beat terribly fast; it was with great satisfaction, I confess, that I saw the lights of the town for which I was bound gleaming and twinkling on a hillside. As soon as I saw those bright specks—like little earthly stars they were—my fright passed away completely. It seemed to me that those unthinking lights were the open eyes of so many friends watching for me.

My horse was no less content than I, and, scenting the sweet odors of a stable, more agreeable to him than the perfume of all the marguerites and wood strawberries on earth, he trotted straight to the Hôtel du Lion-Rouge.

Chapter X — The inn-keeper approached to ask me what I wanted for supper.

He was a pot-bellied man, with a red nose, wall-eyes, and a smile that made the circuit of his head. At every word he uttered he showed a double row of pointed teeth with spaces between, like an ogre's.

A bright light shone through the leaded windows of the hotel, whose tin sign swung from right to left and moaned like an old woman, for the north wind was beginning to freshen.—I turned my horse over to a groom and entered the kitchen.

An enormous fire-place at the end of the room swallowed in its black and red maw a bundle of fagots at every mouthful, and on each side of the andirons, two dogs, almost as large as men, sat on their hind-quarters, roasting themselves with all imaginable phlegm, content to raise their paws a little and heave a sort of sigh when the heat became more intense; but they certainly would have preferred to be reduced to charcoal rather than move back an inch.

My arrival did not seem to please them, and I tried in vain to make their acquaintance by patting them on the head several times; they cast stealthy glances at me that boded no good.—That astonished me, for animals generally take to me.

The inn-keeper approached to ask me what I wanted for supper.

He was a pot-bellied man, with a red nose, wall-eyes, and a smile that made the circuit of his head. At every word he uttered he showed a double row of pointed teeth with spaces between, like an ogre's. The huge kitchen-knife that hung at his side had a doubtful look, as if it might serve several different purposes. When I had told him what I wanted, he went up to one of the dogs and kicked him. The dog got up and walked toward a sort of wheel and went inside with a piteous, complaining air and a reproachful glance at me. At last, seeing that there was no hope for him, he began to turn the wheel and thereby the spit on which the chicken was impaled that was to furnish my supper.—I resolved to throw him the scraps as a reward for his trouble, and looked about the kitchen while the repast was preparing.

The ceiling was formed of huge oaken beams, all discolored and blackened by the smoke from the fire-place and the candles. On the sideboards pewter plates more highly polished than silver shone in the darkness, and white crockery with blue flowers.—The numerous rows of well-scoured saucepans along the walls reminded one not a little of the antique bucklers that we see hung in rows along the sides of Greek or Roman triremes—forgive me, Graciosa, the epic magnificence of that simile. One or two buxom servant-maids were moving around a great table, arranging plates and forks, music more agreeable than any other when one is hungry, for the hearing of the stomach then becomes keener than that of the ear. Take it for all in all, despite the landlord's Christmas-box mouth and saw teeth, the inn had a very honest and pleasing appearance; and even had his smile extended a fathom farther and his teeth been three times as long and white, the rain began to patter against the window-panes and the wind to howl in a fashion to take away all desire to depart, for I know nothing more depressing than the groaning of the wind on a dark and rainy night.

An idea came to me that made me smile—it was that no one in the world would have come to look for me where I was.

Indeed, who would have dreamed that little Madelaine, instead of being tucked away in her warm little bed, with her alabaster night-light beside her, a novel under her pillow, her maid in the adjoining closet, ready to run to her at the least nocturnal fright, was rocking to and fro in a straw chair in a country inn twenty leagues from her home, her booted feet resting on the andirons and her little hands buried jauntily in her pockets?

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; she has left everything, her lovely dresses of bright-colored silks and velvets, her necklaces, her bracelets, her birds and her flowers; she has voluntarily renounced humble adoration, gallant speeches, bouquets and madrigals, the pleasure of being considered lovelier and better adorned than you, the sweet name of woman, everything that was part of her, and has started all alone, the brave girl, to travel the world over to learn the great science of life.

If people knew that, they would say that Madelaine was mad.—You said so yourself, my dear Graciosa;—but the real mad women are they who toss their hearts to the wind and sow their love at random on the stones and on the rocks, without knowing if a single seed will germinate.

O Graciosa! that is a thought I have never had without dismay: to have loved some one who was not worthy! to have shown one's heart all naked to impure eyes and allowed a profane creature to enter its sanctuary! to have mingled its limpid stream for some time with a muddy stream!—However perfectly they may be separated, some trace of the slime always remains, and the stream can never recover its original transparency.

To think that a man has kissed you and touched you; that he has seen your body; that he can say: "She is thus and so; she has such a mark in such a place; her mind runs upon this or that theme; she laughs for this thing and weeps for that; her dreams are like this; I have in my portfolio a feather from the wings of her chimera; this ring is made from her hair; a bit of her heart is folded into this letter; she caressed me so, and these are her usual words of endearment."

Ah! Cleopatra, I understand now why you always had the lover with whom you had passed the night killed in the morning.—Sublime cruelty, for which, formerly, I could find no imprecations strong enough! Great voluptuary, how well you understood human nature, and what deep purpose there was in that savagery! 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; to discover in his character a thousand pettinesses you did not suspect; to discover that what had seemed to you so beautiful through the prism of love is really very ugly, and that he whom you had taken for a true hero of romance is, after all, only a prosaic bourgeois, who wears slippers and a dressing-gown!

I have not Cleopatra's power, and if I had it, I certainly should not have the strength to use it. And so, being neither able nor desirous to cut off my lovers' heads upon getting up in the morning, and being no more inclined to endure what other women endure, I must needs look twice before taking a lover; and that is what I propose to do three times rather than twice, if I should have any desire for one, which I very much doubt after what I have seen and heard; unless, however, I should meet in some blessed unknown country a heart like my own, as the novels say—a pure, virgin heart which has never loved and which is capable of loving, in the true sense of the word; which is not, by any manner of means, an easy thing to find.

Several cavaliers entered the inn; the storm and the darkness had prevented them from continuing their journey.—They were all young, the oldest certainly not more than thirty; their clothes indicated that they belonged to the upper classes, and, even without their clothes, their insolent familiarity and their manners would have made it sufficiently evident. There were one or two who had interesting faces; all the others had, in a greater or less degree, that sort of jovial brutality and careless good-humor which men display among themselves, and which they lay aside completely when they are in our presence.

If they could have suspected that the slender youth half-asleep on his chair in the chimney-corner was by no means what he appeared to be, but a young girl, a morsel for a king, as they say, certainly they would very soon have changed their tone, and you would have seen them swell out and spread their feathers on the instant. They would have approached me with repeated reverences, legs straight, elbows out, a smile in their eyes and mouth and nose and hair and their whole attitude; they would have emasculated the words they used and would have spoken only in velvet and satin phrases; at my slightest movement they would have acted as if they were going to stretch themselves out on the floor by way of carpet, for fear that my tender feet might be bruised by its inequalities; every hand would have been held out to support me; the softest chair would have been placed in the most desirable position;—but I had the outward appearance of a pretty boy and not of a pretty girl.

I confess that I was almost on the point of regretting my petticoats, when I saw how little attention they paid me.—I was deeply mortified for a moment; for from time to time I forgot that I was now wearing man's clothes, and I had to remind myself of it in order to avoid an attack of bad temper.

I sat there, not saying a word, with folded arms, apparently watching with close attention the chicken on the spit, which was turning browner and browner, and the unfortunate dog whose rest I had so unluckily disturbed, who was struggling away in his wheel like several devils in the same holy-water vessel.

The youngest of the party brought his hand down on my shoulder with a force that made me wince, on my word, and extorted from me a little involuntary shriek, and asked me if I would not prefer to sup with them rather than all alone, as several could drink better than one.—I answered that it was a pleasure I should not have dared to hope for, and that I would be very glad to do it. Our places were laid together and we took our seats at the table.

The panting dog, after swallowing an enormous dipperful of water with three laps of his tongue, resumed his post opposite the other dog, who had not stirred any more than if he had been made of porcelain,—the new-comers, by a special dispensation of Providence, not having ordered chicken.

I learned, from some sentences that escaped them, that they were on their way to the court, which was then at—, where they expected to meet other friends. I told them that I was a young gentleman just from the University, on my way to visit my kins-men in the provinces by the true student's road, that is to say the longest he can find. That made them laugh, and after some comments on my innocent and artless appearance, they asked me if I had a mistress. I answered that I knew nothing about mistresses, whereat they laughed still louder. Bottle succeeded bottle with great rapidity; although I was careful almost always to leave my glass full, my head was a little heated, and, not losing sight of my idea, I managed to turn the conversation upon women. It was no difficult task; for, after theology and æsthetics, it is the subject upon which men talk most freely when they are drunk.

My companions were not exactly drunk, they carried their wine too well for that; but they began to enter upon moral discussions that had no end and to rest their elbows unceremoniously on the table.—One of them had gone so far as to put his arm about the extensive waist of one of the maid-servants, and was nodding his head most amorously; another swore that he should burst on the spot, like a toad that has been made to take snuff, unless Jeannette would let him give her a kiss on each of the great red apples that served her as cheeks. And Jeannette, not wishing that he should burst like a toad, gave him permission with very good grace and did not even check a hand that stole audaciously between the folds of her neckerchief into the moist valley of her breast, very insecurely guarded by a little golden cross, and not until he had exchanged some words with her in an undertone did he allow her to remove the dishes.

And yet they were habitués of the court and young men of refined manners, and unless I had seen it myself I should never have thought of accusing them of such familiarity with servants at an inn.—It is probable that they had just left charming mistresses, to whom they had sworn the mightiest oaths known to man: upon my word, it would never have occurred to me to request my lover not to sully lips on which I had placed mine, by contact with the cheeks of a clumsy wench.

The rascal seemed to take as much pleasure in that kiss as if he had kissed Phyllis or Oriana; it was a loud kiss, solidly and honestly bestowed, and left two little white marks on the fiery cheek of the damsel, who wiped them away with the back of the hand that had just been washing the dishes.—I do not believe that he had ever bestowed one so naturally affectionate on the chaste deity of his heart.—That was his thought apparently, for he said in an undertone and with a disdainful shrug:

"To the devil with thin women and high-flown sentiments!"

That moral maxim seemed to suit the party, and all nodded their heads approvingly.

"Faith," said another, following out the same line of thought, "I am unlucky in everything. Messieurs, allow me to inform you, under seal of the most profound secrecy, that I, who speak to you, have a passion at this moment."

"Oho!" exclaimed the others. "A passion! That is depressing to the last degree. What are you doing with a passion?"

"She's a virtuous woman, messieurs; you must not laugh, messieurs; for, after all, why shouldn't I have a virtuous woman? Have I said anything ridiculous?—I say, you over there, I'll throw the house at your head, if you don't have done."

"Well! what then?"

"She is mad over me:—she's the dearest soul in the world; speaking of souls, I know what I'm talking about, I know at least as much about 'em as I do about horses, and I give you my word that hers is the first quality. She is all exaltation, ecstasy, devotion, self-sacrifice, refinements of tenderness, everything that you can imagine that is most transcendent; but she has hardly any breast, indeed she has none at all, like a girl of fifteen at the outside.—She's pretty enough; has a well-shaped hand and pretty foot; she has too much mind and not enough flesh, and sometimes I long to drop her. Damnation! a man doesn't lie with a mind. I'm very unlucky; pity me, my dear friends."—And, made maudlin by the wine he had drunk, he began to weep hot tears.

"Jeannette will console you for the misfortune of lying with sylphs," said his neighbor, pouring him out a bumper; "her soul's so thick that you could make other women's bodies out of it, and she has flesh enough to cover the carcasses of three elephants."

O pure and noble woman! if you knew what is said of you, in wine-shops, regardless of everything, before people he does not know, by the man you love best in the world and for whom you have sacrificed everything! how shamelessly he undresses you, and with base effrontery abandons you all naked to the vinous gaze of his companions, while you sit sadly at your window, your chin resting in your hand, watching the road by which he should return to you!

If any one had told you that your lover, less than twenty-four hours perhaps after leaving you, was making love to a low-born servant, and that he had made arrangements to pass the night with her, you would have insisted that it was not possible, and you would have refused to believe it; you would hardly have trusted your own eyes and ears; but it was so, nevertheless.

The conversation lasted some time longer, extravagant and coarse to the last degree; but through all the exaggerated buffoonery and the jests, which were often obscene, one could distinguish a deep and genuine feeling of profound contempt for woman, and I learned more that evening than by reading twenty cart-loads of moral essays.

The monstrous, incredible things I heard gave to my features a tinge of melancholy and sternness which the other guests noticed and upon which they good-naturedly rallied me; but my cheerfulness refused to return.—I had shrewdly suspected that men were not as they appeared to be before us, but I did not think that they were so entirely different from their masks, and my surprise equalled my disgust.

I would ask no more than half an hour of such conversation to cure a romantic girl forever; it would be more effective than all the maternal remonstrances.

Some boasted of having as many women as they pleased, and that they had only to say a word to procure them; others exchanged receipts for procuring mistresses or lectured upon the tactics to be followed in laying siege to virtue; some ridiculed the women whose lovers they were and proclaimed themselves the most simple fools on earth for trifling away their time with such hussies.—All of them held love very cheap.

Such, then, are the thoughts they conceal from us under such attractive exteriors! Who would dream of it to see them so humble and cringing, so ready for everything?—Ah! after the victory how boldly they raise their heads and how insolently place their heels on the brow they adored from afar and on their knees! how they avenge themselves for their temporary abasement! how dearly they make us pay for their courtesies! and with what bitter insults do they seek a change from the compliments they have paid us! What fierce brutality of language and thought! what boorish manners and bearing!—It is a complete change and certainly not to their advantage. Far as my previsions had gone, they fell a long way short of the reality.

O ideal, thou blue flower with the golden heart, that bloomest, dew-empearled, beneath the spring sky, in the perfumed breath of sweet reveries, and whose fibrous roots, a thousand times finer than the silken tresses of the fairies, burrow to the depths of our soul with their countless hairy heads, to drink its purest substance; thou flower, so sweet and yet so bitter, we cannot uproot thee without making the heart bleed at every pore, and from thy broken stalk ooze great red drops, which, falling one by one into the lake of our tears, serve to measure the halting hours of our death-watch beside the bed of moribund Love!

Ah! accursed flower, how thou hast taken root in my soul! thy branches have multiplied faster than nettles in a ruin. The young nightingales came to drink from thy cup and to sing in thy shade; diamond butterflies, with emerald wings and ruby eyes, fluttered and danced around thy slender pistils, covered with golden dust; swarms of white bees sucked unsuspiciously thy poisoned honey; chimeras folded their swan wings and crossed their lion paws beneath their lovely breasts to rest beside thee. The tree of the Hesperides was no better guarded; sylphs collected the tears of the stars in lily urns, and watered thee every night with their magic watering-pots.—O plant of the ideal, more poisonous than the manchineel or the deadly upas-tree, how bitter the pang, despite thy treacherous flowers and the poison one inhales with thy perfume, of uprooting thee from my soul! Neither the cedar of Lebanon, nor the gigantic baobab, nor the palm-tree a hundred cubits high, could together fill the place thou alone dost occupy, thou little blue flower with the heart of gold!

The supper came to an end at last, and the subject of going to bed was broached; but as the number of guests was twice the number of beds, it naturally followed that it was necessary either to go to bed by detachments or for two to sleep together. It was a very simple matter for the rest of the party, but it was much less simple for me—having in view certain protuberances which the waistcoat and doublet concealed well enough, but which a simple shirt would have revealed in all their damning roundness; and certainly I was little inclined to betray my incognito in favor of any one of these gentlemen, who at that moment seemed to me genuine, self-confessed monsters, but whom I have since recognized as very good fellows and at least as estimable as the rest of their sex.

He whose bed I was to share was comfortably drunk. He threw himself on the mattress with one leg and one arm hanging out, and fell asleep instantly, not as the just man sleeps, but so soundly that, if the angel of the last judgment had come and blown his trumpet in his ear, he would not have waked for that.—That sleep of his simplified the difficulty very much; I took off nothing but my doublet and my boots, climbed over the sleeper's body and lay down outside the clothes on the side next the wall.

So there I was in bed with a man! It was not a bad beginning!—I confess that, despite all my assurance, I was strangely moved and disturbed. It was so extraordinary, so novel a situation, that I could hardly convince myself that it was not a dream.—The other slept on and on, but I could not close an eye all night.

He was a young man of about twenty-four, with a by no means ugly face, black eyelashes and light moustache; his long hair flowed about his head like waves from the overturned urn of a river, a slight flush passed over his pale cheeks like a cloud under the surface of the water, his lips were partly open and smiling a vague, languid smile.

I raised myself upon my elbow and so remained a long while gazing at him by the flickering light of a candle, of which almost all the tallow had rolled down in great drops and the wick was all covered with black thieves.

We lay some distance apart. He was on the extreme edge of the bed; I, with superabundant precaution, had taken my place on the other edge.

Assuredly what I had heard was not calculated to dispose me to tenderness and the lusts of the flesh;—I held men in horror.—And yet I was more restless and agitated than I should have been: my body did not share the repugnance of my mind as fully as it ought.—My heart beat fast, I was very warm, and, twist and turn as I would, I could find no rest.

The most profound silence reigned in the inn; there was not a sound to be heard save now and then the dull thud made by a horse's foot on the stable floor, or the dropping of the rain down the chimney upon the ashes on the hearth. The candle, having reached the end of the wick, smoked and went out.

Black darkness came down between us like a curtain.—You cannot imagine the effect produced upon me by the sudden disappearance of the light.—It seemed to me that it was all at an end, and that I could no longer see my way clearly.—For an instant I was inclined to leave the bed; but what could I have done? It was only two o'clock, all the lights were out, and I could not wander about like a phantom in a strange house. I had no choice but to remain where I was and wait for daylight.

I lay there on my back; with my hands folded on my breast, trying to fix my thoughts upon something and always falling back on this, namely, that I was in bed with a man. I went so far as to wish he would wake up and find out that I was a woman.—Doubtless the wine I had taken, although it was a very small quantity, had something to do with that extravagant idea, but I could not help returning to it.—I was on the point of putting out my hand to wake him and tell him what I was.—A fold in the bedclothes, which caught my arm, was all that withheld me from carrying out my plan: it gave me time for reflection; and while I was extricating my arm, my reason, which I had totally lost, returned, if not entirely, at least enough to keep me within bounds.

Wouldn't it have been very curious if a disdainful charmer like myself, who had resolved to try a man's life ten years before giving him my hand to kiss, had surrendered to the first comer on a wretched bed in an inn! and, upon my word, I was not far from it.

Can a sudden effervescence, a sudden boiling of the blood, checkmate so effectually the most superb resolutions? and does the voice of the body speak louder than the voice of the mind?—Whenever my pride soars too high, I place the memory of that night before its eyes in order to recall it to earth.—I am beginning to share the opinion of most men: what a poor weak thing is female virtue! and upon how small a thing does it depend, Mon Dieu!

Ah! we seek in vain to spread our wings; there is too much slime upon them; the body is an anchor that holds the soul fast to earth; in vain does it spread its sails to the breeze of the loftiest ideas, the vessel remains immovable, as if all the sucking-fishes in the ocean were clinging to its keel. Nature takes delight in hurling such sarcasms at us. 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; the arms, so strong to repel, relax and become more supple and entwining than scarfs. Add to this the contact of an epidermis, a breath blowing through your hair, and all is lost.—Often, indeed, so much is not needed;—the odor of fresh foliage coming from the fields through your open window, the sight of two birds pecking at each other, a marguerite blooming, an old love-song which persists in coming to your mind, do what you will, and which you repeat without understanding its meaning, a warm breeze that disturbs and excites you, the wooing softness of your bed or your couch—any one of these circumstances is enough; even the solitude of your chamber makes you think that two might be very comfortable there, and that no one could find a more delightful nest for a brood of pleasures. The drawn curtains, the half-light, the silence, everything brings you back to the fatal thought that brushes you with its insidious, dovelike wings, and coos softly about your head. The soft stuffs that touch you seem to caress you and their folds cling amorously to your body.—Thereupon the maiden opens her arms to the first footman with whom she happens to be left alone; the philosopher leaves his page unfinished, and, with his head in his cloak, rushes away in hot haste to the nearest courtesan.

I certainly was not in love with the man who caused me such strange agitation.—He had no other charm than that he was not a woman, and in the state in which I then was, that was enough! A man! that mysterious creature who is concealed from us so carefully, the strange animal of whose history we know so little, the demon or the god who alone can realize all the vague dreams of pleasure whose springtime cradles our sleep, the only thought that we have from the time we are fifteen years old.

A man!—The idea of pleasure floated confusedly in my heavy head. The little that I knew of it made my desire burn the brighter. Ardent curiosity urged me to solve once for all the doubts that troubled me and recurred incessantly to my mind. The solution of the problem was on the other side of the leaf; I had but to turn it, the book was beside me.—Such a comely youth, such a narrow bed, such a dark night!—a girl with a few glasses of champagne in her brain! what a suspicious gathering!—Ah well! the result of it all was a most virtuous void.

I began to be able to distinguish the position of the window in the wall on which my eyes were fixed, by favor of the lessening darkness; the panes of glass became less opaque and the gray light of the morning, slipping behind them, restored their transparency; the sky lighted up little by little: it was day.—You cannot conceive the pleasure it gave me to see that pale gleam on the green hangings of Aumale serge which surrounded the glorious battlefield whereon my virtue had triumphed over my desires! It seemed to me that it was my crown of victory.

As for my bedfellow, he had fallen out onto the floor.

I rose, made my toilet rapidly, ran to the window and threw it open; the morning air did me good. I stood in front of the mirror to comb my hair, and I was amazed at the pallor of my face which I imagined was purple.

The others came in to see if we were still asleep, and kicked their friend, who did not seem greatly surprised to find where he was.

The horses were saddled and we resumed our journey.

But this is enough for to-day: my quill refuses to make a mark and I am disinclined to mend it; another time I will tell you the rest of my adventures; meanwhile love me as I love you, Graciosa the well-named, and do not form too poor an opinion of my virtue from what I have just told you.

XI

Many things are bores: it is a bore to return the money you have borrowed and have become accustomed to look upon as your own; it is a bore to-day to caress the woman you loved yesterday; it is a bore to call at a friend's house about dinner-time and find that the master and mistress have been in the country a month; it is a bore to write a novel and even more so to read one; it is a bore to have a pimple on your nose and chapped lips on the day you go to call on the idol of your heart; it is a bore to have to wear jocose boots that smile at the pavement through all their seams, and above all things to have an empty void behind the spider's web in your pocket; it is a bore to be a concierge; it is a bore to be an emperor; it is a bore to be one's self or even to be somebody else; it is a bore to go on foot because it hurts your corns, to ride because it rubs the skin off the antithesis of your front, to drive because some fat man inevitably makes a pillow of your shoulder, or to travel on a packet-boat because you are seasick and turn yourself inside out;—it is a bore to live in winter because you shiver and in summer because you perspire; but the greatest bore on earth, in hell, or in heaven, is beyond all question a tragedy, unless it be a melodrama or a comedy.

It really makes me sick at heart.—What can be more idiotic and more stupid? The great tyrants with voices like bulls, who pace across the stage from wing to wing, waving their hairy arms like the sails of a windmill, imprisoned in flesh-colored tights, are nothing more than wretched counterfeits of Bluebeard or the Bogey. Their rodomontades would make any one who could keep awake burst with laughter.

The unfortunate lovers are no less ridiculous.—It is a most diverting thing to see them come forward, dressed in black or white, with hair weeping on their shoulders, sleeves weeping on their hands, and their bodies ready to burst from their corsets like a nut when you squeeze it between your fingers; walking as if they meant to sweep the boards with the soles of their satin shoes, and in great outbursts of passion throwing back their trains with a little twist of the heel.—The dialogue, being exclusively composed of oh! and ah! which they roll about under their tongues as they spread their plumage, is pleasant pasturage surely and readily digested.—Their princes are very charming, too; only they are a bit gloomy and melancholy, which does not prevent their being the best companions in the world or elsewhere.

As for the comedy which is intended to correct our morals, and which luckily performs its duty with only moderate success, I consider that the fathers' sermons and the uncles' everlasting repetitions of the same things are as crushing on the stage as in real life.—I am not of the opinion that you double the number of fools by representing them on the stage; there are already quite enough of them, thank God, and the race is not nearly extinct.—What is the necessity of drawing the portrait of a man with a pig's snout or the muzzle of an ox and collecting the foolish talk of a clown whom you would throw out of the window if he came to your house? The image of a pedant is as uninteresting as the pedant himself, and he is no less a pedant because you look at him in a mirror.—An actor who should succeed in imitating perfectly the manner and attitudes of a cobbler would not be much more entertaining than a real cobbler.

But there is a stage that I love, the fanciful, extravagant, impossible stage, where the virtuous public would hiss pitilessly from the first scene, for lack of understanding a word.

That is a strange stage indeed.—Glow-worms instead of lamps; a beetle beating time with its antennæ is stationed in the conductor's box. The cricket plays in the orchestra; the nightingale is first flute; little sylphs, coming from sweet-pea blossoms, hold bass-viols made of lemon peel between their pretty ivory-white legs, and with an ample supply of arms draw bows made from Titania's eyelashes over spider's web strings; the little wig with three horns worn by the beetle who leads the orchestra trembles with pleasures, and showers a luminous dust about; the harmony is sweet and the overture so well executed!

A curtain of butterflies' wings, thinner than the interior pellicle of an egg, rises slowly after the regulation three blows. The hall is filled with the souls of poets sitting in stalls of mother-of-pearl, and watching the play through drops of dew mounted upon the golden pistils of lilies.—They are their opera-glasses.

The scenery resembles no known scenery; the country it represents is more unknown than America before its discovery.—The palette of the richest painter has not the half of the colors in which it is painted: the tones are all striking and unusual: ash-green, ash-blue, ultramarine, red and yellow lacquer are used lavishly.

The sky, of a greenish blue, is striped with broad light and faun-colored bands; little slender trees wave in the middle distance their sparse foliage of the color of dried rose-leaves; the background, instead of swimming in azure vapor, is of the most beautiful apple-green, and spiral columns of golden smoke float up-ward here and there. A stray beam catches upon the pediment of a ruined temple or the spire of a tower.—Cities full of steeples, pyramids, domes, arches, and balustrades are perched on hillsides and reflected in crystal lakes; tall trees with great leaves, cut deep on the edges by fairy scissors, entwine their trunks and branches inextricably to form the wings. The clouds in the sky pile up above their heads like snow-balls, you see the eyes of dwarfs and gnomes shining through their interstices and their tortuous roots bury themselves in the ground like the fingers of a giant hand. The woodpecker taps rhythmically on them with its beak of horn, and emerald-green lizards warm themselves in the sun on the moss about their feet.

The mushroom watches the play with his hat on his head, like the insolent rascal he is: the delicate violet stands on the tips of its tiny toes between two wisps of grass, and opens its blue eyes wide to see the hero pass. The bullfinch and the linnet swing on the ends of twigs to prompt the actors in their parts.

Amid the tall grass, the purple thistles and the burdocks with velvet leaves, brooks made by the tears of stags at bay wander like silver snakes; here and there anemones gleam on the turf like drops of blood and marguerites swell with pride, their heads laden with wreaths of pearls like veritable duchesses.

The characters are of no time and no country; they come and go no one knows how or why; they neither eat nor drink, they live nowhere and have no trade; they possess neither estates nor houses nor consols; sometimes they carry under their arms a little casket full of diamonds as large as pigeons' eggs; when they walk they do not brush a single drop of dew from the petals of the flowers or raise a single atom of dust from the roads.

Their clothes are the most fantastic and extravagant clothes imaginable. Pointed, steeple-shaped hats with brims as broad as a Chinese parasol and plumes of inordinate length taken from the tail of the bird of paradise and the phœnix: striped capes of brilliant colors, velvet and brocade doublets, showing their lining of satin or cloth of silver through their gold-laced slashes; full short-clothes, swelling like balloons; scarlet stockings with embroidered clocks, shoes with high heels and broad rosettes; fragile swords, point up, hilt down, all covered with cords and ribands;—so much for the men.

The women are no less curiously apparelled.—The drawings of Della Bella and Romain de Hooge may serve to indicate the general character of their attire; dresses of heavy, undulating stuffs, with broad folds which change color like the breasts of pigeons, and display all the varying hues of the iris, ample sleeves from which other sleeves issue, ruffs of open-slashed lace that rise higher than the heads for which they serve as frames, corsages covered with bows and embroidery, brooches,—strange trinkets, tufts of heron's feathers, necklaces of huge pearls, peacock's tail fans with mirrors in the centre, little slippers and pattens, wreaths of artificial flowers, spangles, striped gauze, paint, patches and everything that can add zest and piquancy to a stage costume.

It is a style that is not precisely English or German or French or Turkish or Spanish or Tartar, although it partakes a little of them all and has taken from each country, its most graceful and characteristic features.—Actors thus arrayed can say whatever they choose without offending one's ideas of probability. The fancy can run in all directions, style uncoil its variegated rings at its pleasure, like a snake warming itself in the sun; the most exotic conceits open fearlessly their strangely-shaped calyxes and spread their perfume of amber and musk around.—There is nothing to offer any obstacle, either places or names or costumes.

How fascinating and entertaining what they say! Fine actors that they are, they do not strut about, like our howlers of melodrama, twisting their mouths and forcing the eyes out of their heads to deliver their tirades with effect;—at all events they haven't the appearance of workmen at a task, of oxen harnessed to the plot and in a hurry to have done with it; they are not plastered with chalk and rouge half an inch thick; they don't wear tin daggers and keep in reserve under their waistcoats a pig's bladder filled with chicken's blood; they don't drag the same oil-spotted rag about through whole acts.

They speak without hurry, without shrieking, like people of good breeding who attach no great importance to what they are doing; the lover makes his declaration to his sweetheart in the most nonchalant manner imaginable; as he speaks he taps his thigh with the ends of his gloved fingers or adjusts the leg of his trousers. The lady carelessly shakes the dew from her bouquet and jokes with her maid; the lover cares but little about touching his cruel enslaver's heart: his principal business is to let fall bunches of pearls from his mouth and clusters of roses, and to sow poetic precious stones like a true prodigal;—often he effaces himself altogether and allows the author to pay court to his mistress for him. Jealousy is not one of his defects and his disposition is most accommodating. With his eyes raised toward the sky, and the frieze of the theatre, he waits patiently for the poet to finish saying what passed through his mind, before resuming his rôle and returning to his knees.

The whole plot is tangled and untangled with admirable indifference; effects have no cause and causes have no effect: the brightest character is he who says the greatest number of foolish things; the greatest fool says the brightest things; the maidens make speeches that would make harlots blush; harlots declaim moral maxims. The most incredible adventures follow one another in rapid succession and are never explained; the noble father arrives post-haste from China in a little bamboo junk to identify a little kidnapped girl; the gods and fairies do nothing but ascend and descend in their machines. The plot plunges into the sea under the topaz dome of the waves and walks on the bottom of the ocean, through the forests of coral and madrepore, or rises skyward on the wings of the skylark or the griffin.—The dialogue is shared by all; the lion contributes to it with an oh! oh! in a vigorous roar; the wall speaks through its fissures and every one is at liberty to interrupt the most amusing scene provided that he has an epigram, a rebus or a pun to interject: Bottom's ass's head is as welcome among them as Ariel's blond locks;—the author's wit is displayed in every conceivable form; and all the contradictions are like so many facets, as it were, which reflect its different aspects, adding the colors of the prism thereto.

This apparent pell-mell and confusion are found, when all is said, to render real life more accurately under their fantastic guise than the most painstaking drama of manners.—Every man embodies all humanity in himself, and by writing what comes into his head, he succeeds better than by copying outside objects by means of a magnifying-glass.

O what a fine family!—romantic young lovers, wandering damsels, accommodating ladies' maids, sarcastic clowns, valets and innocent peasants, free-and-easy kings, whose names are unknown to the historian, and the kingdom of the geographer; parti-colored clowns with miraculous capers and biting repartees; oh! ye, who give free speech to caprice through your smiling mouths, I love you and adore you above all the world!—Perdita, Rosalind, Celia, Pandarus, Parolles, Silvio, Leander and the rest, all the charming types, so false and yet so true, who rise above vulgar reality on the bespangled wings of folly, and in whom the poet personifies his joy, his melancholy, his love and his most secret dreams under the most frivolous and most unconventional appearances.

There is one play, written for the fairies and properly to be played by moonlight, that delights me more than any other in the repertory of this theatre;—it is such a vagabond, wandering play, with such a vague plot and such strange characters, that the author himself, not knowing what title to give it, called it Comme il vous plaira,[1] an elastic name, which answers all purposes.

While reading that strange play, you seem to be transported into an unfamiliar world of which you have nevertheless some vague reminiscence; you are not sure whether you are dead or alive, awake or dreaming; gracious faces smile sweetly upon you and toss you an affable greeting as they pass; you feel strangely moved and disturbed at sight of them as if you should suddenly meet your ideal at an angle in the road, or the forgotten phantom of your first mistress should rise suddenly before you. Springs bubble up from the ground, murmuring half-stifled plaints; the wind stirs the foliage of the venerable trees over the exiled duke's head with compassionate sighs; and when the melancholy Jaques confides his philosophic lamentations to the stream, with the leaves of the willow, it seems to you that you yourself are speaking and that the most secret and most obscure thoughts of your heart come forth into the light.

O youthful son of the gallant Sir Rowland de Bois, so maltreated by fate! I cannot help being jealous of you; you still have a faithful servant, honest Adam, whose old age is still green under his snow-white locks.—You are banished, but not until you have at least struggled and triumphed; your wicked brother takes all your property from you, but Rosalind gives you the chain from her neck; you are poor, but you are beloved; you leave your country, but your persecutor's daughter follows you beyond the sea.

The dark forest of Arden opens wide its great arms of foliage to welcome and conceal you; the kindly forest heaps up its silkiest moss in the depths of its grottoes for your bed; it bends its leafy arches over your brow to protect you from the rain and sun; it pities you with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its bleating fawns and deer; its rocks afford convenient desks on which to write your amorous epistles; it lends you the brambles from its bushes with which to attach them, and orders the satiny bark of its aspens to yield to the point of your stiletto when you wish to carve Rosalind's initials thereon.

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; in vain do we sigh, no obliging echo takes the trouble to send back our lamentations embellished with imperfect rhymes and gay conceits.—In vain do we hang sonnets to the sharp points of all the brambles, Rosalind never picks them off, and we carve amorous ciphers on the bark of trees gratuitously.

Birds of heaven, lend me each a feather, swallow and eagle, humming-bird and roc, that I may make of them a pair of wings to soar aloft and swiftly through unknown regions, where I shall find nothing to recall to my mind the city of the living, where I can forget that I am myself and live a strange, new life, farther than America, farther than Africa, farther than Asia, farther than the farthest island in the world, through the ocean of ice, beyond the pole where the Aurora Borealis flickers, in the impalpable kingdom to which the divine creations of poets and the types of supreme beauty take flight.

How can one endure the ordinary conversation at clubs and salons when one has heard you speak, sparkling Mercutio, whose every sentence bursts in a shower of gold and silver, like a pyrotechnic bomb beneath a star-studded sky? Pale Desdemona, what pleasure, think you, one can take in any earthly music, after the ballad of the Willow? What women do not seem ugly beside your Venuses, ye ancient sculptors, poets who wrote strophes in marble?

Ah! despite the fierce embrace with which I have sought to enlace the material world in default of the other, I feel that my birth was a mistake, that life was not made for me and that it spurns me; I can no longer take part in anything; whatever road I follow, I go astray; the smooth avenue, the stony path, alike lead me to the abyss. 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; 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; my thoughts, more restless and uneasy than goats, cling to the most dangerous peaks; my hatred, swollen with poison, twists its scaly folds into inextricable knots, and crawls along in ruts and ravines.

My soul is a strange country, in appearance flourishing and splendid, but more reeking with fetid, deleterious miasmas than Batavia itself; the faintest sunbeam on the slime causes reptiles and venomous insects to breed;—the great yellow tulips, the nagassaris and angsoka with their gorgeous flowers conceal the heaps of disgusting carrion. The amorous rose opens her scarlet lips in a smile and discloses her tiny dew-drop teeth to the gallant nightingales who sing sonnets and madrigals to her: nothing can be more charming; but it is a hundred to one that a dropsical toad is crawling along on her clumsy feet in the grass at the foot of the bush, whitening his path with his slaver.

There are springs clearer and more transparent than the purest diamond; but it would be better for you to drink the stagnant water of the swamp under its cloak of rotting shrubs and drowned dogs than to dip your cup in that basin.—A serpent lies hidden at the bottom, and twists and turns with frightful rapidity, disgorging his venom.

You have planted wheat; your crop is asphodel, henbane, tares and pale hemlock with twigs covered with verdigris. Instead of the root you set out, you are surprised to see the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora coming up out of the earth.

If you leave a memory there and go to take it up again some time after, you will find it more covered with moss and more swarming with palmer-worms and vile insects than a stone laid on the damp floor of a cavern.

Do not try to pass through its dark forests; they are more impassable than the virgin forests of America and the jungles of Java; creepers strong as cables run from tree to tree; all the paths are obstructed by bristling plants as sharp as lance-heads; the very turf is covered with a stinging down like that of the nettle. From the arches of the foliage, gigantic bats of the vampire species hang by their nails; beetles of enormous size wave their horns threateningly, and thrash the air with their four-footed wings; monstrous, fantastic beasts, like those we see in nightmares, come clumsily forward, crushing the reeds before them. There are troops of elephants, who crush flies in the wrinkles of their flabby skin and rub their sides against the rocks and trees, rhinoceroses with their rough, uneven hides, hippopotami with their swollen snouts bristling with hair, who knead the mud and the débris of the forest with their huge feet.

In the clearings, where the sun insinuates a luminous beam like a wedge of gold through the damp atmosphere, you will always find, on the spot where you propose to sit, a family of tigers lying at their ease, sniffing the air, winking their sea-green eyes, and polishing their velvet coats with their blood-red, papilæ-covered tongues; or else it is a tangled knot of boas, half asleep, digesting the last bull they have devoured.

Be suspicious of everything; grass, fruit, water, air, shade, sunlight, all are deadly.

Close your ears to the chattering of the little paroquets with golden beaks and emerald necks, that fly down from the trees and perch on your finger, with fluttering wings; for the little paroquets with the emerald necks will end by gently pecking your eyes out with their pretty golden beaks, just as you bend to kiss them.—So it is.

The world will have none of me; it spurns me like a spectre escaped from the tombs; I am almost as pale as one; my blood refuses to believe that I am alive and will not tinge my flesh; it crawls sluggishly through my veins like stagnant water in obstructed canals.—My heart beats for none of those things that make men's hearts beat.—My sorrows and my joys are not those of my fellow-creatures.—I have fiercely desired what no one desires; I have disdained what others wildly long for.—I have loved women who did not love me, and I have been loved when I would have liked to be hated; always too soon or too late, too much or too little, too far or not far enough; never just what was needed; either I have not arrived or I have gone beyond.—I have thrown my life out of the window, or I have concentrated it too exclusively upon a single point, and from the restless activity of the busybody I have passed to the deathlike somnolence of the teriaki or the Stylite on his pillar.

What I do seems always to be done in a dream; my actions seem rather the result of somnambulism than of free will; there is something within me, which I feel vaguely at a great depth, which makes me act without my own initiative, and always outside of ordinary laws; the simple and natural side of things is never revealed to me until after all the others, and I lay hold first of all that is eccentric and unusual; however straight the line, I will soon make it more winding and tortuous than a serpent; contours, unless they are marked in the most precise way, become confused and distorted. Faces take on a supernatural expression and gaze at me with awe-inspiring eyes.

Thus, by virtue of a sort of instinctive reaction, I have always clung desperately to matter, to the exterior outline of things, and I have awarded a great share of my esteem to the plastic in art.—I understand a statue perfectly, I do not understand a man; where life begins, I stop and recoil in dismay as if I had seen the head of Medusa. The phenomenon of life causes me an astonishment from which I cannot recover.—I shall make an excellent corpse, I doubt not, for I am an extremely poor living man, and the meaning of my existence escapes me completely. The sound of my voice surprises me beyond measure, and I am tempted sometimes to take it for somebody else's voice. When I choose to put out my arm and my arm obeys me, it seems to me a most prodigious thing, and I fall into the most profound stupefaction.

By way of compensation, Silvio, I perfectly understand the unintelligible; the most extravagant motifs seem perfectly natural to me and I enter into them with extraordinary facility. I readily find the sequel of the most capricious and most incomprehensible nightmare.—That is why the class of plays I described to you just now pleases me above all others.

Théodore and Rosette and I have great discussions on this subject: Rosette has but little relish for my system, she is for true truth; Théodore would give the poet more latitude, and would not exclude conventional, optical truth.—For my part, I maintain that the field must be left absolutely free for the author and that the imagination must hold sovereign sway.

Many of the guests based their arguments on the ground that plays of this sort were as a general rule outside of the ordinary stage conditions and could not be acted; I answered that that was true in one sense and false in another, just like everything else that people say, and that their ideas as to the possibilities and impossibilities of the stage seemed to me to lack exactness and to be based upon prejudices rather than arguments; and I said among other things that the play of As You Like It was certainly capable of being performed, especially for society people who were not accustomed to other parts.

That suggested the idea of acting it. The season is drawing on and all other forms of amusement are exhausted; we are weary of hunting, of riding and boating parties; the chances of boston, varied though they be, are not exciting enough to fill up the evening, and the proposition was received with universal enthusiasm.

A young man who knows how to paint offered his services to paint the scenery; he is working at it now with much zeal, and in a few days it will be finished.—The stage is erected in the orangery, which is the largest apartment in the chateau, and I think everything will go off well. I am to play Orlando; Rosette was to be the Rosalind, as it was proper that she should be; as my mistress and the mistress of the house, the rôle was hers as of right; but she has refused to masquerade as a man, through some whim most extraordinary for her, for prudery certainly is not one of her faults. If I had not been sure of the contrary, I should have thought that her legs are not well formed. Actually not one of the ladies in the party would consent to seem less scrupulous than Rosette, and the play was very near falling through; but Théodore, who was to take the part of the melancholy Jaques, offered to take her place, inasmuch as Rosalind is a man, almost all the time, except in the first act, when she is a woman, and with a little paint, a pair of corsets and a dress, he could carry out the deception well enough, having no beard as yet and being very slender in figure.

We are now learning our parts and it is a curious thing to see us.—In every solitary nook in the park you are sure of finding some one, with a roll of paper in his hand, mumbling to himself, looking up at the sky, then suddenly lowering his eyes, and making the same gesture seven or eight times. Any one who didn't know that we were going to give a play would certainly take us for inmates of a lunatic asylum, or poets—which is almost a pleonasm.

I think we shall soon know our parts well enough to have a rehearsal.—I expect something very interesting. Perhaps I am wrong.—I was afraid for a moment that our actors, instead of acting by inspiration, would strive to reproduce the gestures and intonation of some fashionable comedian; but luckily they have not followed the stage closely enough to make that mistake, and it is to be hoped that, amid the natural awkwardness of people who have never stood on the boards, they will show some precious gleams of nature and a charming naïveté that the most consummate talent cannot equal.

Our young painter has really done marvels:—it is impossible to give a stranger look to the old tree-trunks and the ivies that enlace them; he has taken the trees in the park for his models, accentuating and exaggerating them, as should properly be done for stage scenery. The whole thing is done with admirable spirit and fancy; the rocks, the cliffs, the clouds are of mysterious, fantastic shapes; reflections play upon the surface of the water, more trembling and shimmering than quicksilver, and the ordinary coldness of the foliage is wonderfully relieved by the saffron tints laid on by the brush of autumn; the forest varies from emerald green to purple; the warmest and coldest tints blend harmoniously and the very sky changes from a delicate blue to the most glowing colors.

He has designed all the costumes in accordance with my suggestions; they are of the most beautiful type. There was an outcry at first that they could not be translated in silk and velvet or any known material, and there was a moment when the troubadour costume was on the point of being generally adopted. The ladies said that the brilliant colors would put out their eyes. To which we replied that their eyes were inextinguishable stars, and that they, on the other hand, would put out the colors, as well as the Argand lamps, the candles and the sun, if they had the chance.—They had no reply to make to that; but there were other objections that sprung up in crowds and bristled with heads like the Lernean hydra; no sooner was one head cut off than two others appeared even more stupid and obstinate.

"How do you suppose that can be done?—Everything looks all right on paper, but it's a different matter on your back; I can never get into that!—My skirt's at least four inches too short; I shall never dare to appear that way!—That ruff is too high; I look as if I were hunchbacked and hadn't any neck.—That wig ages me intolerably."

"With starch and pins and good-will anything can be done.—You're joking! a figure like yours, slenderer than a wasp's waist and quite capable of going through the ring on my little finger! I will bet twenty-five louis against a kiss that that waist will have to be pulled in.—Your skirt is very far from being too short, and if you could see what an adorable leg you have you would certainly be of my opinion.—On the contrary, your neck stands out admirably in its halo of lace.—That wig doesn't make you look a day older, and even if it should seem to add a few years, you look so exceedingly young that it ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to you; really, you would arouse strange suspicions in our minds if we didn't know where the pieces of your last doll are,"—et cetera.

You cannot imagine the prodigious quantity of compliments we have been obliged to squander, to compel our ladies to don charming costumes which are becoming to them beyond words.

We have also had much trouble to make them adjust their patches properly. What devilish taste women have! and of what titanic obstinacy a capricious dainty creature is capable, who thinks that straw-yellow is more becoming to her than jonquil-yellow or bright pink! I am sure that if I had applied to public affairs one-half the ruses and scheming I have employed to induce a woman to wear a red feather on the left side and not on the right, I should be Minister of State or Emperor at the very least.

What a pandemonium! what a vast, inextricable tangle a real theatre must be!

Since the suggestion of giving a play was first made, everything here has been in the most complete disorder. All the drawers are open, all the wardrobes emptied; it is a genuine case of pillage. Tables, chairs, consoles, all are covered, and we have no place to put our feet; enormous quantities of dresses, mantles, veils, petticoats, capes, caps, hats, are scattered about the house; and when you reflect that they are all to go on the bodies of seven or eight people, you involuntarily think of the jugglers at a fair who wear eight or ten coats one over the other, and you cannot realize that from all that mass only one costume for each will emerge.

The servants are constantly coming and going;—there are always two or three on the road between the chateau and the town, and if this goes on all the horses will be broken-winded.

A theatrical manager has no time to be melancholy, and I have been in that condition hardly at all for some days. I am so benumbed and bewildered that I am beginning to lose all comprehension of the play. As I play the part of impresario in addition to the part of Orlando, my task is twofold. When any difficulty arises, I am the one to whom they all run, and as my decisions are not listened to like oracles, interminable disputes are the result.

If what is called living is to be always on one's legs, to answer twenty people at once, to go up and down stairs, not to think for a minute during the day, I have never lived so hard as I have this week; and yet I do not take so much part in this constant movement as you might think.—The excitement extends a very short distance below the surface, and a few fathoms down you would find dead water, without any current; life does not penetrate me so easily as that; indeed, at such times I am least alive, although I seem to act and to mingle in what is going on; action stupefies and tires me to an inconceivable degree;—when I am not acting, I am thinking or dreaming, and that is one manner of living;—I have it no longer since I have laid aside my porcelain-image repose.

Thus far I have done nothing, and I doubt if I ever shall do anything. I do not know how to stop my brain, therein lies all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius; there is a constant effervescence, wave pushing wave; I cannot master this sort of waterspout that rises from my heart to my head, and drowns all my thoughts because they have no means of exit.—I can produce nothing, not from sterility but from superabundance; my ideas sprout in such dense, serried masses that they choke one another and cannot ripen.—However swift and impetuous the execution, it can never attain such velocity:—when I write a sentence the thought that it expresses is already as far from me as if a century had passed instead of a second, and it often happens, in spite of myself, that some part of the thought that succeeded it in my brain is mingled with it.

That is why I cannot live,—either as poet or as lover.—I can express only the ideas that I no longer have;—I have women only when I have forgotten them and love others;—how can I, a man, make my will known, when, however much I hasten, I no longer feel what I am doing and act only in accordance with a faint memory.

To take a thought from some one of my brain-cells, in the rough, like a block of marble just from the quarry, to place it before me, and from morning to night, a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, hew and pound and chip, and carry away a pinch of dust at night to dry my writing,—that is what I never shall be able to do.

I can distinguish clearly enough in my mind the slender figure from the unhewn block, and I have a very distinct idea of it; but there are so many angles to smooth, so many protuberances to hew away, so many blows of rasp and hammer to be given to approximate the shape and catch the true curve of the outline, that my hands blister and the chisel drops to the ground.

If I persist, my fatigue reaches such a point that my sight is totally obscured and I can no longer see through the marble cloud the white divinity concealed within it. Thereupon I follow it at random, feeling my way; I bite too deep in one place, I do not go far enough in another; I hack away what should be a leg or an arm, and I leave a compact mass where there should be a hollow; instead of a goddess I make a monkey, sometimes less than a monkey, and the magnificent block, taken at such great expense of money and labor from the bowels of the earth, hammered and hewn on every side, has rather the appearance of having been gnawed and bored by polypi to make a bee-hive, than fashioned by a sculptor according to a preconceived plan.

How were you able, Michael Angelo, to cut marble in slices as a child carves a chestnut? of what steel were your unconquerable chisels made? and from whose robust loins did ye come forth, ye fruitful, hard-working artists, whom no form of matter can resist, and who describe your dream from beginning to end in color and in bronze?

It is innocent and justifiable vanity in a certain sense, after the cruel remarks I have made concerning myself—and you surely will not blame me for it, O Silvio!—but, although the world is unlikely ever to know it, and my name is predestined to oblivion, I am a poet and a painter!—I have as beautiful ideas as any poet on earth; I have created types as pure, as divine as those that are most admired among the masters.—I see them before me as clear, as distinct as if they were really painted, and if I could open a hole in my head and put a window in so that people could look, there would be the most marvellous gallery of pictures the world has ever seen. No king on earth can boast of possessing such a one.—There are Rubenses as flaring, as brilliantly lighted as the purest examples at Antwerp; my Raphaels are in a most excellent state of preservation and his Madonnas have no more winning smiles; Buonarotti does not twist a muscle with more spirit and more appalling force; the sun of Venice shines upon yonder canvas as if it were signed: Paulus Cagliari; the shadows of Rembrandt himself are heaped up in this picture, with a pale star of light glimmering in the distance; the pictures that are in my own manner would certainly not be despised by any one.

I am well aware that it seems strange for me to say this and that I shall seem to be suffering from the vulgar intoxication of the most idiotic pride;—but it is a fact and nothing will shake my conviction in that respect. No one will share it probably; but what am I to do? Every one is born marked with a black or white stamp. Apparently mine is black.

Sometimes I have difficulty in concealing my thoughts on this subject; it has happened not unfrequently that I have spoken too familiarly of the exalted geniuses whose footprints we should adore and upon whose statues we should gaze from afar on our knees. Once, I forgot myself so far as to say: We.—Luckily it was in the presence of a person who took no notice of it, otherwise I should undoubtedly have been looked upon as the most conceited puppy that ever was.

Am I not a poet and a painter, Silvio?

It is a mistake to think that all people who have been supposed to possess genius were really greater men than others. No one knows how much the pupils and obscure artists employed by Raphael contributed to his reputation; he gave his signature to the product of the mind and talent of several,—that is all.

A great writer and a great painter are in themselves enough to people a whole epoch: they must first of all attack all styles of work at once, so that, if any rivals should rise up, they can instantly accuse them of plagiarism and check them at the first step in their career; those are familiar tactics and succeed none the less every day, even though they are not new.

It may be that a man already famous has precisely the same sort of talent that you have; under penalty of being considered an imitator of him, you are obliged to divert your natural inspiration and make it flow in another channel. You were born to blow with all your lungs into the heroic clarion, or to evoke pale phantoms of the times that are no more; but you must move your fingers up and down the flute with seven holes, or tie knots on a sofa in some boudoir, all because monsieur your father did not take the trouble to throw you into the mould eight or ten years earlier, and because the world cannot conceive of such a thing as two men tilling the same field.

Thus it is that many noble intellects are compelled knowingly to take a road that is not theirs, and constantly to skirt their own domain from which they are banished, happy to cast a stealthy glance over the hedge, and to see on the other side, blooming in the sunlight, the lovely bright-colored flowers which they possess in the form of seed, but cannot sow for lack of soil.

For my own part, except for the greater or less opportunity afforded by circumstances, the difference in air and light, a door which has remained closed and should have been thrown open, a meeting missed, some one I ought to have known but have not known,—I cannot say whether I should ever have succeeded in anything.

I have not the necessary degree of stupidity to become what is called a genius pure and simple, nor the prodigious obstinacy which is eventually deified under the high-sounding name of will, when the great man has reached the radiant summit of the mountain, and which is indispensable to attain that height;—I know too well how hollow all things are and that they contain only putrefying matter, to attach myself for very long to anything and follow it ardently and exclusively through everything.

Men of genius are very shallow, and that is why they are men of genius. Lack of intelligence prevents them from perceiving the obstacles that separate them from the end they wish to attain; they go ahead, and in two or three strides devour the intervening spaces.—As their mind remains obstinately closed to certain currents, and as they see only the things that are most closely connected with their ends, they expend much less thought and action; nothing diverts them, nothing turns them aside, they act more by instinct than otherwise, and some of them, when removed from their special sphere, exhibit a nullity hard to understand.

Assuredly it is a rare and charming gift to write poetry well; few people take more pleasure than I in poetical matters;—but I do not choose to limit and circumscribe my life within the twelve feet of an alexandrine; there are a thousand things that interest me as much as a hemistich:—the state of society and the reforms that must be undertaken are not among those things; I care extremely little whether the peasants know how to read and write or whether men eat bread or browse on grass; but there pass through my brain, in an hour, more than a hundred thousand visions which have not the slightest connection with rhyme or the cæsura, and that is why I actually do so little, although I have more ideas than some poets who could be burned alive with their own works.

I adore beauty and I feel it; I can describe it as well as the most amorous sculptors can understand it,—and yet I am no sculptor. The ugliness and imperfections of the rough sketch disgust me; I cannot wait until the work reaches perfection by dint of polishing and repolishing; if I could make up my mind to omit certain things in what I do, whether in versifying or in painting, I should end perhaps by writing a poem or painting a picture which would make me famous, and they who love me—if there be any one on earth who takes that trouble—would not be compelled to believe me on my word alone and would have a triumphant retort for the sardonic sneers of the detractors of that great unknown genius, myself.

I see many who take a palette and brushes and cover their canvas, paying no further attention to what caprice produces at the end of the bristles, and others who write a hundred lines at a time without an erasure and without once stopping to look up at the ceiling.—I always admire them, even if sometimes I do not admire their productions; I envy with all my heart the fascinating intrepidity and fortunate blindness that prevent them from seeing even their most palpable defects. As soon as I have drawn anything out of line I notice it instantly and am concerned beyond measure by it; and, as I am much more learned in theory than in practice, it often happens that I cannot correct an error of which I am conscious; thereupon I turn the canvas with its face to the wall and never go back to it.

I have my ideal of perfection so constantly present in my mind, that disgust with my work seizes me at once and prevents me from continuing.

Ah! when I compare with the sweet smile of my thought the ugly pout it makes on the canvas or the paper, when I see a hideous bat fly by in place of the lovely dream that opened its long wings of light in the bosom of my nights; a thistle spring up in response to the idea of a rose; and when I hear a donkey bray as I am expecting the sweetest melodies of the nightingale, I am so horribly disappointed, so angry with myself, so furious at my impotence, that I resolve never to write again or say a single word of my life, rather than commit thus the crime of high treason against my thoughts.

I cannot succeed even in writing a letter as I would like to do; I often say something entirely different; certain portions develop immeasurably, others dwindle away till they become imperceptible, and very often the idea I had it in my mind to express is not there at all, or is in a postscript.

When I began to write you I certainly did not intend to say the half of what I have said.—I simply intended to inform you that we were going to give a play; but one word leads to a sentence; parentheses are big with other little parentheses, which in their turn have others in their wombs all ready to be born. There is no reason why this should end, why it should not go on to two hundred folio volumes—which would certainly be too much.

As soon as I take up a pen, there is a great humming and rustling of wings in my brain, as if millions of June-bugs had been let loose inside. They bump against the walls of my skull and turn and fly up and down with a horrible uproar; they are my thoughts, trying to fly away and seeking an outlet;—all of them struggle to get free at once; more than one of them breaks his paws and tears the down from his wings; sometimes the door is so blocked that not one succeeds in crossing the threshold and reaching the paper.

That is the way I am made: it is not what can be called well made, I agree, but what would you have? the fault is with the gods and not with me, a poor devil who cannot help himself. I do not need to ask your indulgence, my dear Silvio; it is accorded me in advance, and you are kind enough to read my undecipherable scrawls to the end, my headless and tailless musings; however disjointed and absurd they may be, they always interest you, because they come from me, and anything that is a part of me, even when it is worthless, is not without some value to you.

I can let you see the thing that most offends the common herd: honest pride.—But let us cry truce for a while to all these exalted topics, and as I am writing on the subject of the play we are to give, let us return to it and talk about it a little.

The rehearsal took place to-day:—never in my life have I been so upset,—not because of the embarrassment that one always feels in reciting anything before a number of people, but from an entirely different cause. We were in costume and ready to begin; Théodore alone had not appeared; we sent to his room to see what delayed him; he replied that he was almost ready and would come down in a moment.

He came; I heard his step in the corridor long before he appeared, and yet no one on earth has a lighter step than Théodore; but my feeling of sympathy for him is so strong that I divine his movements through the walls, and when I felt that he was about to put his hand on the door-knob, I began to tremble and my heart beat with horrible force. It seemed to me that something of importance in my life was about to be decided, and that I had reached a solemn, long-expected moment.

The folding-doors slowly opened and closed.

There was a general cry of admiration.—The men applauded, the women turned scarlet. Rosette alone became extremely pale and leaned against the wall, as if a sudden revelation were passing through her brain; she went through the same experience as myself in the opposite direction.—I have always suspected her of loving Théodore.

I have no doubt that, at that moment, she believed as I did that the pretended Rosalind was nothing less than a young and lovely woman, and the fragile card-house of her hope suddenly collapsed, while mine rose on its ruins; at least that is what I thought; I may be mistaken, for I was hardly in a condition to make accurate observations.

Aside from Rosette, there were three or four pretty women present; they looked disgustingly ugly.—Beside that sun, the star of their beauty was suddenly eclipsed, and every one wondered how he could ever have thought them passable. Men who, before that moment, would have deemed themselves very fortunate to have them for mistresses, would hardly have taken them for servants.

The image which hitherto had been drawn only faintly and with vague outlines, the adored, vainly-pursued phantom was there, before my eyes, living, palpable, no longer in half light and haze, but bathed in floods of white light; not in a fruitless disguise, but in her true costume; not in the mocking guise of a young man, but with the features of the loveliest of women.

I experienced a sensation of unbounded well-being, as if a mountain or two had been lifted off my chest.—I felt my horror of myself vanish and I was delivered from the tiresome duty of regarding myself as a monster. I began to form an altogether pastoral opinion of myself and all the violets of spring bloomed anew in my heart.

He, or rather she—for I wish to forget that I was stupid enough to take her for a man—remained a moment motionless on the threshold, as if to give the assemblage time to utter its first exclamation. A brilliant light shone upon her from head to foot, and against the dark background of the corridor that stretched away behind her, the carved doorway serving as a frame, she glowed as if the light emanated from herself instead of being reflected simply, and you would have taken her for a marvellous product of the brush rather than a human creature made of flesh and blood.

Chapter XI — The folding-doors slowly opened and closed.

There was a general cry of admiration.—The men applauded, the women turned scarlet. Rosette alone became extremely pale and leaned against the wall, as if a sudden revelation were passing through her brain; * * * I have always suspected her of loving Théodore.

Her long dark hair, mingled with ropes of huge pearls, fell in natural ringlets beside her lovely cheeks! her shoulders and her breast were bare, and I never saw anything so beautiful in the world; the finest marble would not compare with that exquisite perfection.—How the life rushes beneath that dark transparent skin! how white the flesh and at the same time how richly colored! and how happily the changing golden tints soften the transition from the skin to the hair! what a fascinating poem in the graceful undulations of those contours, more supple and velvety than a swan's neck!—If there were words to express what I feel, I would write you a description fifty pages long; but languages were made by some donkeys or other who had never looked closely at a woman's back or breast, and we haven't half enough of the most indispensable terms.

I really think that I must become a sculptor; for to have seen such beauty and to be unable to reproduce it in one form or another is enough to make one a raving maniac. I have written twenty sonnets on those shoulders, but that is not enough: I would like something exactly similar which I could touch with my finger; verses reproduce only the phantom of beauty and not beauty itself. The painter produces a more exact likeness, but it is only a likeness. Sculpture has all the reality that a thing absolutely false can have; it can be looked at on every side, it casts a shadow, and you can touch it. Your carved mistress differs from the genuine only in that she is a little harder and cannot speak, two very trifling drawbacks.

Her dress was made of some material of changing color, azure in the light, golden in the shadow; a close-fitting buskin was tightly laced about a foot that needed not that to make it too small, and scarlet silk stockings clung amorously about the most perfectly moulded and most tempting of legs; her arms were bare to the elbows, where they emerged from a mass of lace, round and plump and white, gleaming like polished silver and of unimaginable fineness of texture; her hands, laden with rings, languorously waved a great fan of fantastically-colored feathers, like a little pocket rainbow.

She walked into the room, her cheeks slightly flushed with a color that was not paint, and every one went into ecstasies and exclaimed and wondered if it was possible that it was really he, Théodore de Sérannes, the daring horseman, the consummate duellist, the determined hunter, and if they could be perfectly sure that it was not his twin sister.

"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! who would not be her Orlando?"

Aye—who would not be Orlando to such a Rosalind, even at the price of the torments I suffered?—To love as I loved with a monstrous, unavowable passion, which, however, one cannot uproot from his heart; to be condemned to maintain the most profound silence and not to dare to say what the most prudent and respectful lover would say without fear to the most prudish and rigid of women; to feel one's self consumed by an insensate flame, unjustifiable even in the eyes of the most confirmed libertines;—what are ordinary passions beside that—a passion which is shameful in itself and hopeless, and, which, even in the improbable event of its success, would be a crime and would kill you with shame? To be reduced to hope for failure, to dread favorable chances and opportunities, and to avoid them as another would seek them—such was my fate.

The most profound discouragement had taken possession of me; I viewed myself with horror mingled with surprise and curiosity. The thing that shocked me most was the thought that I had never loved before, and that this was the first effervescence of my youth, the first daisy of my springtime of love.

In my case this monstrosity replaced the refreshing, modest illusions of adolescence; my dreams of tender affection, so fondly cherished as I walked at evening on the edge of the woods, through the narrow blushing paths, or along the white marble terraces beside the lake in the park, were to be metamorphosed into this deceitful sphinx with the equivocal smile, the ambiguous voice, before whom I stood speechless, afraid to undertake the solution of the enigma! To interpret it falsely would have caused my death; for alas! it is the only bond that attaches me to the world; when it is broken, all will be over. Take that gleam of light away from me and I shall be more silent and inanimate than the embalmed mummy of the first of the Pharaohs. At the moments when I felt most violently drawn toward Théodore, I threw myself back in dismay into Rosette's arms, although I had an indescribable feeling of repulsion for her; I tried to place her between Théodore and myself as a shield and barrier—and when I lay beside her, I felt a secret satisfaction in the thought that she at all events was unquestionably a woman, and that, even if I did not love her, she still loved me enough to prevent our liaison from degenerating into intrigue and debauchery.

I felt in my heart, however, through it all, a sort of regret at being thus unfaithful to the idea of my impossible passion; I blamed myself for it as for an act of treachery, and although I was well aware that I should never possess the object of my love, I was displeased with myself, and was cold to Rosette once more.

The rehearsal was much more successful than I hoped; Théodore, especially, was admirable; the others thought that I, too, acted extremely well.—It is not that I have the essential qualities of a good actor, and it would be a very great mistake to think that I am capable of taking other parts in the same way; but, by a strange chance, the words I had to say fitted in so well with my situation, that it seemed to me as if I had written them rather than learned them by heart from a book.—If my memory had failed me for a moment, I certainly should not have hesitated before filling the void with an improvised phrase. Orlando was myself quite as much as I was Orlando, and it is impossible to imagine a more extraordinary coincidence.