"Good-by, good-by. How slowly the hours go by! Who says time has wings? I do not know what I would give if I could go to sleep in this enervating languor, and not awake until Tuesday morning. But no, I will not sleep. I, too, have killed my sleep. I have the constant vision of your mouth."
CHAPTER VI.
For several days voluptuous visions had haunted him without a truce. Desire awoke in his flesh with inconceivable violence. A warm puff of air, a waft of perfume, the rustle of a skirt, mere trifles, sufficed to modify his entire being, to make him languorous, to light up his face with a flame, to accelerate the pulsations of his arteries, to throw him into an agitation bordering on delirium.
At the profoundest depths of his substance he bore the germs inherited from his father. He, the creature of thought and sentiment, had in his flesh the fatal heredity of that brutish being. But in him instinct had become a passion, and sensuality had assumed almost morbid forms. He was as grieved over this as if it were a shameful malady: he had a horror of these fevers which assailed him unexpectedly, which consumed him miserably; which left him debased, arid, powerless to think. He suffered from certain passions as though they degraded him. Certain sudden passages of brutality, similar to hurricanes over a growing field, devastated his mind, dried up all his inner sources, made painful furrows which for a long time he could not succeed in filling up.
At the dawn of the great day, as he awoke after a few hours of a restless dozing, he thought, with a thrill of all his nerves: "She arrives to-day! To-day, in the light of to-day, my eyes will see her! I will hold her in my arms! It almost seems to me as if it will be the first possession; it seems to me, too, that I could die of it." The vision conjured up gave him so rude a shock that he felt his body traversed from tip to toe by a start similar to that caused by an electric discharge. In him appeared those terrible physical phenomena against the tyranny of which he was defenceless. All his conscience fell beneath the absolute empire of desire. Once more the hereditary lewdness broke out with an invincible fury in this delicate lover whom it pleased to call his mistress "sister," and who had a thirst for spiritual communions. He contemplated, in mind, his mistress's beauty; and every contour, seen through the flame, assumed in his eyes a radiant splendor, chimerical, almost superhuman. He contemplated, in mind, his mistress's grace; and every attitude assumed a voluptuous fascination of inconceivable intensity. In her, all was light, perfume, and rhythm.
This admirable creature he possessed—he, he alone.... But, spontaneously, as the smoke rises from a poor fire, a jealous thought disengaged itself from his desire. To dissipate the agitation which he felt growing, he sprang from the bed.
At the window, at dawn, the olive-tree branches had an imperceptible undulation, pale, between gray and white. The sound of the sparrows discreetly twittering was heard above the dull, monotonous wash of the sea. In a stable a lamb bleated timidly.
He went out into the loggia, comforted by the tonic virtue of a bath, and drank in deeply the morning air charged with savory odors. His lungs dilated; his thoughts took their flight, agile, each marked with the image of the waited-for woman; a feeling of renewed youth made his heart palpitate.
Before him was the maturity of the sun, pure, simple, without a vestige of clouds, without mystery. Above the silver sea arose a crimson disk, clearly defined, almost sharp, like a disk of metal fresh from the forge.
Colas di Sciampagne, who was busy cleaning the court, cried out to him: