"No; you are my poem; you are all my poems, and far the most beautiful of all."
He was forbidden to talk. The slightest conversation fatigued him, and often brought on a fit of coughing. Moreover, he had hardly strength enough to talk. What was left to him of life, of thought, of will to express, of sensibility, was concentrated in his gaze, which had become a glowing fireplace, in which the soul continually kindled a flame of surprising and supernatural intensity. That evening, the evening of the sixth of October, he seemed no longer to be suffering. Oh! I see him still, stretched upon his bed, his head high upon his pillow, his long thin hands playing tranquilly with the blue fringe of the curtain, his lips smiling at me, and his eyes, which, in the shade of the bed, shone and burned like a lamp, following all my goings and comings.
They had placed a couch in the room for me, a nurse's couch and—oh! irony, in order doubtless to spare his modesty and mine—a screen behind which I could, undress. But often I did not lie upon the couch; Monsieur Georges wanted me always by his side. He was really comfortable, really happy, only when I was near him.
After having slept two hours, almost peacefully, he awoke toward midnight. He was a little feverish; the spots at the points of his cheek-bones were a little redder. Seeing me sitting at the head of his bed, my cheeks damp with tears, he said to me, in a tone of gentle reproach:
"What, weeping again? You wish, then, to make me sad, and to give me pain? Why do you not lie down? Come and lie down beside me."
I cried, shaken by sobs:
"Ah! Monsieur Georges, do you wish me, then, to kill you? Do you wish me to suffer all my life from remorse at having killed you?"
All my life! I had already forgotten that I wanted to die with him, to die of him, to die as he died.
"Monsieur Georges! Monsieur Georges! Have pity on me, I implore you!"
But his lips were on my lips. Death was on my lips.