“Spello, October....
“Dearest Maria,
“Since you as ever appear to me what you are, a creature of truth, and since you tell me briefly and honestly—and in reading I almost seem to hear your voice—‘Marco, our dream is over,’ I ought to elevate my spirit to your moral height where a lie is impossible, and repeat loyally, ‘Maria, our dream is over.’ It was beautiful. No meanness disturbed its violent grandeur, no weakness spoiled its power, no hypocrisy disturbed its purity, and we indeed preferred to break the social knot rather than loosen it miserably. Moreover, we preferred to give a single sorrow to others rather than inflict ridicule and humiliation on them every day, and we preferred to exile and isolate ourselves than drag deception and fraud from drawing-room to drawing-room, from home to home. We lived so impetuously and ardently in a fulness and richness of life, which, darling Maria, neither of us will ever find again, which ought not to be found again because certain destinies have but one existence. Ours is past and the dream is ended. Nothing remains for us except the enduring memory of its beauty and intensity.
“We believed this dream to be eternal; we believed that it would have led us hand in hand together, full of desire and hope, even to the hour of death. Such is the measured small eternity of man! Not even was this true, not even was this modest cycle of years, modest compared with Time, just the life of a man and a woman, given to our dream. The hours, days, and years were limited, not by us, not by our enthusiasm, not by our anxiety, but by the laws of passion themselves, those immutable laws, alas! which each believes he can change, which each hopes to elude, and by which we are all dominated.
“Adored Maria, you have had from me all the love which a young man, impassioned and sincere, can give to an adorable woman such as you are; but love is a brief matter, with a brevity which frightens all desolate and tender souls, all faithful hearts and feeling fibres. He who says that he desires only one woman for all his life, either deceives or is deceived. We wished to be constant, faithful, and tenacious of our love, but it escaped us fatally, every day increasingly, till our devastated and cold hearts felt that that love had vanished, because thus it must be, since it is the law; since this brevity is the essential condition of its force and beauty, and this brevity is the reason of its perfidious fascination. We have loved each other, dearest Maria, for three years. A cynic would tell you that they are many, that they are too many—three years. But remember that a cynic always conceals a soul desolated by the reality of things. I shall tell you that the time has been just what it had to be, and, in telling you this, how my heart overflows with an intense bitterness against love’s fall, against the misery of this sentiment and its fugacity. Otherwise I had hoped, lady mine, otherwise we had hoped together. We believed, too, and feared that unhappiness and sorrow would have come to us from outside, from those whom we had abandoned, from laws which we had violated, from society which we had offended. Instead, all the inconsolable sadness of this moment comes from ourselves, from our dead souls, from our dead hearts and senses, where our love has lived, but from whence it has disappeared, leaving colourless ashes which the wind will carry away. Maria, how I should like to rise against myself, against my mortal weariness and indifference. I should like to galvanise my spirit, resuscitate this corpse, and I torture myself in vain, while tears of useless anger course my cheeks. Maria, I am dying through not loving you, but I cannot live to love you.
“O dear Maria, I hope you love me no longer. So it should be. Do you remember our first meeting, in a box at the theatre, one evening when the music of love and torture was filling the house—Les Huguenots? Do you remember the first long devouring glance in that box, and the first expressive pressure of the hands, as if they could not disentangle themselves? We loved each other at the same instant. We both abandoned ourselves to the vortex which was engulfing us, and neither hesitated. Neither dragged the other into the delirious circle of passion. Together we gave ourselves, blind, mute, conquered and infatuated. Both, without the one suggesting it to the other, decided to live alone, free, obscure, ignored and forgotten, and neither, in flying from everything, trembled at the mad plan or hesitated. So, Maria, I not only hope but believe that you do not love me.
“In your house of love, lady mine, in that house where the magnificent flower of our passion sprouted and sent forth its celestial perfumes, in that house, which alone of the dream will remain uncancellable in our minds as the house of the most beautiful dream of our lives, I know you are weeping in despair because you no longer love me. I see you weeping about your barren heart, about your exhausted soul, your spent desire, about everything where love is dead. I see sighs swell your throat, and your head fall convulsively on your pillow.
“It is the same with me, Maria; just the same. Never was love born with such consent, never did love live in such equality, and never did love so disappear from two conquered and fettered beings.
“Oh, if I had to think differently, Maria, I should kill myself! If I had to believe that this death of love had only struck me, and that while I no longer had the spark to give light and heat you were still burning; if I had to see you still in love with a man who no longer loved you, if this moral inferiority had to strike me, if I alone had to appear deserted by love, inept to love, inept to feel through my personal weakness of mind—Maria, Maria, I should kill myself. How could I live longer, near to you, far from you, loving you no more while you still loved me, inflicting on the dearest, best, most beautiful of women, upon her who alone for three years has seemed a woman to me, my indifference?
“Maria, write to me, swear to me that you love me no more. I can’t bear the thought that you may still be burning with love for me; I can’t bear the thought of grieving you with the dumbness of my mind. Maria, I owe to you three years of perfect happiness. You have beautified my existence with every grace and charm of yours. You have lavished all the treasures of your heart with a generosity and magnificence which has no equal. You have given me all yourself, and I have known what exaltation a man can enjoy without dying of too much joy. And for this, my lady, gentle and proud, for all this that I owe you I cannot give you a sorrow which has not its equal, that of loving still when one is not loved. Swear that your desolation is only for the dream which has vanished in you as in me; that your tears are of an infinite bitterness for love and not for me; that I am as a brother in sorrow and not a fickle and forgetful lover; that you can think of me without a shock, but with sadness for things which are extinct; that nothing glows in you; that your blood is without fever, and your phantasy is without visions—that you are like me.