“With a parting kiss of her fingers to it (the room), she softly closed the door, and went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late secretary’s room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined from the emptiness of his table and the general appearance of things that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall-door and softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the outside—insensible old combination of wood and iron that it was—before she ran away from the house at a swift pace.”
“The good little fellow had become alarmingly limp, and his senses seemed to be rapidly escaping, from the knees upward. Bella sprinkled him with kisses instead of milk, but gave him a little of that article to drink, and he gradually revived under her caressing care.”
“Bella tucked her arm in his, with a merry, noiseless laugh, and they went down to the kitchen on tiptoe, she stopping on every separate stair to put the tip of her forefinger on her rosy lips, and then lay it on his lips, according to her favorite petting way of kissing pa.”
“The purity with which in these words she expressed something of her own love and her own suffering made a deep impression on him for the passing time. He held her, almost, as if she were sanctified to him by death, and kissed her, once, almost as he might have kissed the dead.”
Some of our best writers of fiction have successfully tried their descriptive power upon the “torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion” which maybe concentrated in a burning kiss, but none of them surpass Victor Hugo in graphic vigor. Take the following passages, for example, from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” In the exciting scene between Esmeralda, the gipsy, and Captain Phœbus, the unfortunate girl proceeds:
“‘Look at me! look on her who came to seek you. My soul, life, body, all are yours. Let us not marry, if it displeases you,—and then, what am I? a wretched stroller, while you, my Phœbus, are a gentleman. A pretty thing, truly, for a dancing-girl to wed an officer! I was out of my mind. No, Phœbus, I will be your toy, your plaything, a slave to you. I am made for that; sullied, scorned, dishonored, but loved! I will be the proudest and gladdest of women. And when I shall be old, Phœbus, when my days for loving you are over, you will, won’t you, still allow me to serve you? Let others broider your scarfs; I, the servant, may take care of them, and your sword and your spurs. You will grant me this, Phœbus? So, take me! we gipsies only are made for the free air and to love.’