"Ah! I regret that this is not the stone on which her foot has stumbled, for I should understand at least.
"After all, she was only to answer me. I think that I have been sufficiently precise and if acts rather than words were needed, have I not given myself up to acts?
"Ah! I am weary, as weary as she is weary.
"If you do not wish to drink the dew I offer to your lips in the hollow of my hand, some beast, bolder or wiser, will pass, that will refresh itself with this drink of love.
"Come while it is morning and while animal life sleeps in the woods!
"Come to roam among the wet herbs: I will shake off the rain of pearls and the snow flakes of diamonds from your blond hair!
"Come and you will exult with joy, come, the train of your robe, among the mosses, will make a wake of light, and the rising sun will kiss, in its candor, the smile of your purple lips!
"Come, you will be as a white-browed queen among green branches, and the tame butterflies will rest on your ears.
"You will subdue nature and at the call of your mouth, my soul, wild as a fawn, will bound towards you."
Analyses and dithyrambs formulated the same slavery. He wished to make this woman happy, to see her eyes drawn back and her lips, by the oppression of an emotion, opened. The evocation was suddenly effected, not, it is true, under the direct visual form, but in a far away vaporous and voluptuous world. Kneeling near her, after the last evolutions of the embrace, he contemplated her.
"Truly my life is transferred into this woman as under the attraction of a magnet, and truly the center of my forces is in that heart!
"Those blond lashes of her blue eyes are the chains of my days, and the blond shadow of her hair is the halo of bright moons whose splendor illumines my nights."
He would have proceeded at greater length, for his words were unleased, but the vision vanished.
"Presage: Ah! pretty beast! ah! pretty beast!"
"All this has been badly managed. I should have designed, as Calixte suggested, this woman in the pure rôle of a Beatrice exempt from carnal affairs,--but being a woman, she would not have understood: Beatrice, who lent herself to this sublime play, was a dream creature, obeying the poet and the very symbol of his thought. This one had to fall into my arms, or other arms would have snatched her.