"Yes. Things could not go on like that. Love had become an overwhelming nightmare to me. Victory or death, as the Politics says, such was the alternative which destiny imposed. One evening, in a wood..., at the edge of a pond..., after a melancholy walk in which her eyes reflected the gentleness of heaven, and my heart was thrilling with hell...."
"What!"
"What's that?"
"What do you mean?"
"It was inevitable. I had too great a sense of justice to beat, to insult, or to dismiss an irreproachable servant. But I had to reconcile that feeling to the horror which that being inspired in me; rid myself of that being without losing her respect. What would you want me to do with her, since she was perfect?"
The three others looked at him with an uncertain and somewhat stupefied gaze, as though feigning not to understand and as though tacitly avowing that they did not feel themselves capable of so rigorous an act, however sufficiently accounted for in another.
Then they ordered fresh bottles, to kill time whose life is so sturdy, and to speed life, whose movement is so slow.
SOUP AND THE CLOUDS
My well-beloved little madcap was dining with me, and through the open window of the dining-room I was contemplating the moving architecture which God formed from the vapors, the marvellous constructions of the impalpable. And I was saying to myself, in my reflection: "All these phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful well-beloved, the little prodigious madcap with green eyes."