“Mademoiselle de Maupin,” petite édition, Charpentier, 2 vols.; vol. ii, page 12.
“I am a man of the Homeric ages;—the world in which I live is not mine, and I comprehend nothing of the social system by which I am surrounded. Never did Christ come into the world for me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. Never have I been to Golgotha to gather passion-flowers; and the deep river flowing from the side of the crucified, and making a crimson girdle about the world, has never bathed me with its waves.”
Page 21: “Venus may be seen; she hides nothing; for modesty is created for the ugly alone; and is a modern invention, daughter of the Christian disdain of form and matter.”
“O ancient worlds! all thou didst revere is now despised; thine idols are overthrown in dust; gaunt anchorites clad in tattered rags, gory martyrs with shoulders lacerated by the tigers of the circuses, lie heaped upon the pedestals of thy gods so comely and so charming;—the Christ has enveloped the world in his winding sheet. Beauty must blush for herself, must wear a shroud.”
Pages 22, 23: “Virginity, thou bitter plant, born upon a soil blood-moistened, whose wan and sickly flower opes painfully within the damp shadows of the cloister, under cold lustral rains;—rose without perfume, and bristling with thorns,—thou hast replaced for us those fair and joyous roses, besprinkled with nard and Falernian, worn by the dancing girls of Sybaris.”
“The antique world knew thee not, O fruitless flower!—never wert thou entwined within their garlands, replete with intoxicating perfume;—in that vigorous and healthy life, thou wouldst have been disdainfully trampled under foot! Virginity, mysticism, melancholy,—three unknown words, three new maladies brought among us by the Christ. Pale spectres who deluge the world with icy tears and who,” etc., etc.
TO REV. WAYLAND D. BALL
New Orleans, 1883.
SECRET AFFINITIES
(A Pantheistic Madrigal)
“Emaux et Camées—Enamels and Cameos”