A Night in the Luxembourg - Remy de Gourmont

I love you, Elise. Do you love me?

ELISE

I love you, my friend. But give me my hand again, that I may arrange these flowers for the feast-day of our hearts. Let us listen to our master and be wise.

I let fall Elise's hand, after kissing it once more. A very sweet smile thanked me, and I saw, under the white robe, her bosom swell with love.

The little one, tired of running about, had sat down on a low chair, leaning her head against the knees of her comrade, who, absently, was playing with her yellow hair. My master, his eyes on this charming picture, whose emotion he seemed to make his own, said nothing. After several moments of a silence that enriched my life, he spoke again:—

If I have sometimes come to visit men, it has been for love of their women. Not that, like the gods whose stories are written by the poets, I desire a multiplicity of embraces. I come less to love than to let myself be loved. I belong to those who wish to make me theirs, and I make myself for their hearts the ideal man whom earth refuses them.

For you have created woman, you men, and you have remained inferior to your creation. You have not known how to acquire the gifts that would have completed the miracle, and your loves are always lame. You take, and you do not give; you impoverish the fields that are fertilised by your desire, and the women you have loved die of thirst as they look at the dryness of your eyes.

All three were listening, very attentively. Elise, however, was good enough to take my fingers and press them, while her two friends rose, and were going to kiss the hand of the master. But he opened his arms, and they fell on his breast as fall two flowers plucked by the wind. Elise and I watched with pleasure this charming episode, and I said to myself, naïvely: "He welcomes these two women as he would have welcomed all women, and I understand that he can belong at the same time to all at once and to each one in particular." Elise's hand, meanwhile, began to grow restless in mine. She said in a whisper and unevenly, these enigmatic words:—

ELISE