They sat down under the shadowy trees, she on a grassy knoll, and he lower down, at her feet. The wind in the stems sang that sweet chant of the pine-trees which is like a wail of sorrow; and the immense Limagne, with its unseen backgrounds steeped in fog, gave them a sensation exactly like that of the ocean. Yes, the sea was there in front of them, down below. They could have no doubt of it, for they felt its breath fanning their faces.
He talked to her in the coaxing tone that one uses toward a child.
"Give me your fingers and let me eat them—they are my bonbons, mine!"
He put them one after the other into his mouth, and seemed to be tasting them with gluttonous delight.
"Oh! how nice they are!—especially the little one. I have never eaten anything better than the little one."
Then he threw himself on his knees, placed his elbows on Christiane's lap, and murmured:
"'Liane,' are you looking at me?" He called her Liane because she entwined herself around him in order to embrace him the more closely, as a plant clings around a tree. "Look at me. I am going to enter your soul."
And they exchanged that immovable, persistent glance, which seems truly to make two beings mingle with one another!
"We can only love thoroughly by thus possessing one another," he said. "All the other things of love are but foul pleasures."
And, face to face, their breaths blending into one, they sought to see one another's images in the depths of their eyes.