6
They were now able to talk together. Their remarks would not be vain, ordinary or frivolous. During the first moments of isolation, each of them had pursued her own thoughts and continued her own life. Each had reached that perfect diapason at which the most antagonistic spirits are in supreme unison. Heedless of different objects or of diverse aims, the same yearning for generosity, the same thirst after graciousness and beauty united their hearts; and their minds, leaping all barriers, came to an understanding of one another in a region beyond opinions. All these young and beautiful creatures, all these forms fashioned for delight exhaled an atmosphere of love. Were they not all alike its votaries?
One alone, in a fiercer glow of enthusiasm and with a doubtless finer sensualism, one alone attempts to offer up her life to a God! The glorious folly of her! How I love to see her, vainly tormenting her beauty, seeking infinity, aspiring to bear peace across the world. I see her soul like a walled garden in which all the flowers lift themselves higher and higher, struggling to offer themselves to a moment of light. But, in a day of greater discontent and in an hour of maturity, the illusory fence will fall and the fair life will stand in open space. Then, drunk with boundless earth and boundless sky, the woman, restored to nature, will doubtless find herself more attuned to pleasure than were the others and more responsive to joy.
I looked at all those bowed heads, dark or fair, dusky or golden, those lovely forms revealed by their clinging robes, those delicate profiles bent over the portraits and writings of their sisters, far-off friends, vanished, unknown or absent, whose power of love still lives for all men and for all time ... immortal tears, petals dropped from the flower.
Then my glistening eyes turned towards my Roseline. She was there, indifferent, unmoved, perhaps secretly bored.
And my thoughts wept in my heart.
The most beautiful things cannot be given.