"Sixtine leaned forward, drawn by the magnetism of the noble speech, then fell back in her seat, dreamy, her fingers trembling, feeling the imperious desire of a hand to envelop her hand. Without moving her head, she turned her eyes towards Hubert: he was listening, less moved than fascinated.
"I want to live! Do you understand, madman that you are!... I thirst after serious things! I want to breathe the full air of the sky!"
The same esthetic thrill shook them at the same instant: their breath came faster, they had grown pale; their lips opened as for silent exclamations.
The electric current which descended down their spines with rapid waves stirred their limb, and at last, unconsciously attracted to each other, they were forced to let their hands obey the attraction of the fluids.
Then, the intensity of the emotional excitement doubled: their beings floated in a warm and caressing eddy, under the delicious downpour of a water-fall warmed by a mysterious sun, and the corporeal flowers of sensuality burned to open.
They listened, without letting a syllable of the magic prose escape their ears, and they dreamed while listening; they forgot "the omnipotence of inferior minds;" they deified each other, they ascended, supple and light, the mystic steps, summoned now by the illusion of a very pure and very expanding air at the summit of a narrow mountain above the clouds. Indeed, they had, "agitated minds," as the male character of the piece had so well said; they said to the whole world: "Your joys are not my joys;" all that stirred outside of them, all things that agitated below their flight were quite truly "infantile and noxious," in the silence they were in rapport with their "old friend"; they cried aloud to life: "It is no longer a question of all this! Adieu!..."
And at the end, when they went down with the curtain's fall to the stupefied room, the same stifled cry issued from their mouths, the cry of Hamlet:
"Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!"
Entragues, swept away by a movement of anger, so little in accord with his usual character, thus challenged a man who was hissing: