“If you think I could find any pleasure in living among my works! I know my figures too well—they weary me. Whatever is without secret lacks charm.” She looked at him with affected spite.
“You had not told me that one had lost all charm when one had no more secrets.”
He put his arm around her waist.
“Ah! The things that live are only too mysterious; and you remain for me, my beloved, an enigma, the unknown sense of which contains the light of life. Do not fear to give yourself to me. I shall desire you always, but I never shall know you. Does one ever possess what one loves? Are kisses, caresses, anything else than the effort of a delightful despair? When I embrace you, I am still searching for you, and I never have you; since I want you always, since in you I expect the impossible and the infinite. What you are, the devil knows if I shall ever know! Because I have modelled a few bad figures I am not a sculptor; I am rather a sort of poet and philosopher who seeks for subjects of anxiety and torment in nature. The sentiment of form is not sufficient for me. My colleagues laugh at me because I have not their simplicity. They are right. And that brute Choulette is right too, when he says we ought to live without thinking and without desiring. Our friend the cobbler of Santa Maria Novella, who knows nothing of what might make him unjust and unfortunate, is a master of the art of living. I ought to love you naively, without that sort of metaphysics which is passional and makes me absurd and wicked. There is nothing good except to ignore and to forget. Come, come, I have thought of you too cruelly in the tortures of your absence; come, my beloved! I must forget you with you. It is with you only that I can forget you and lose myself.”
He took her in his arms and, lifting her veil, kissed her on the lips.
A little frightened in that vast, unknown hall, embarrassed by the look of strange things, she drew the black tulle to her chin.
“Here! You can not think of it.”
He said they were alone.
“Alone? And the man with terrible moustaches who opened the door?”
He smiled: