Their love was, from its very nature, very far removed from all those common-place unions founded, some on gross sensual pleasure, others on motives of interest more or less disguised, which represent the greater part of human love. Their cultivated minds kept them isolated in the loftier regions of thought; their delicacy of feeling kept them in an ideal atmosphere where all material burdens were forgotten; the extreme impressibility of their nerves, the exquisite refinement of all their sensations, brought them delights whose enjoyment seemed to have no end. If there is love in other worlds, it can be no deeper or more exquisite feeling. To a physiologist they would have been the living witnesses of the fact that, contrary to ordinary opinion, all enjoyment comes from the brain, the intensity of sensation corresponding to the psychic sensibility of the being.
Paris was for them, not a city, not a world, but the theatre of human history. They lived the past centuries over again. The old quarters which had not yet been ruined by modern changes,—the Cité, with Notre Dame, Saint-Julien le Pauvre, whose walls still recall Chilpéric and Frédégonde; the old houses where Albert le Grand, Petrarch, Dante, Abelard, had lived; the old University, anterior to the Sorbonne, and belonging to the same vanished centuries; the cloister of Saint-Merry with its sombre little paths, the abbey of Saint-Martin, Clovis' tower on the mountain, Saint-Geneviève, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a relic of the Merovingians, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, whose bell sounded the tocsin, the Sainte-Chapelle at Louis IX.'s palace, all memorials of French history, were the object of their pilgrimages. They were alone in crowds, looking into the past and seeing what very few people know how to see.
And so the immense city spoke its language of other days,—either when, lost amid the monsters, griffins, pillars, and capitals, the arabesques of the tower and galleries of Notre Dame, they saw the human hive go to sleep at their feet in the evening dusk, or, when rising higher still, they tried from the top of the Panthéon to restore the old outlines of Paris and its gradual development from the Roman emperors who lived in the Baths, to Philip Augustus and his successors.
The spring sunshine, the blooming lilacs, the joyous May mornings, full of bird-songs and nervous exhilaration, often drew them at random away from Paris into the meadows and woods. The hours flew by like a breath of wind, the day had passed like a thought, and the night prolonged the divine dream of love. In the swiftly revolving world of Jupiter, where the days and nights are twice as rapid as they are here, and do not even last ten hours, lovers do not find the time fade away any more quickly. The measure of time is in ourselves.
They were sitting one evening on the roof of the old tower at the Château de Chevreuse; there was no railing, and they were close together in the centre, from whence one can look down over the unobstructed surrounding landscape. The warm air from the valley, impregnated with wild perfumes from the neighboring woods, rose to where they sat; the warbler was still singing, and the nightingale in the growing shadows was trying over his melodious hymn to the stars. The sun had just set in a blaze of crimson and gold, and the west alone was still illuminated by a glowing radiance. Everything seemed to be asleep on Nature's broad bosom.
Icléa was a little pale; but in the glow of the western sky her skin was so clear, so delicate, so ideal that the light seemed to penetrate it and illuminate it from within. Her eyes were misty with soft languor, and her little, childlike mouth was lightly parted; she seemed lost in contemplation of the sunset light. Leaning on Spero's breast, her arms twined about his neck, she was sinking into a revery when a shooting-star crossed the sky just over the tower. She started with a little feeling of superstition.
The most brilliant stars were already sparkling in the heavenly depths. Arcturus, a brilliant golden yellow, was very high, almost at the zenith; Vega, a pure white light, had already risen towards the west; in the north, Capella; in the west, Castor, Pollux, and Procyon. The seven stars of the Great Bear, Regulus, Spica Virginis, were also discernible. Noiselessly, one by one, the stars came out to punctuate the heavens. The north star showed the only motionless spot in the celestial sphere.
The moon was rising, its reddish disk somewhat diminished from being on the wane. Mars was shining between Pollux and Regulus in the southwest, Saturn in the southeast. Twilight was slowly yielding its place to the mysterious reign of night.