"When I returned to 'my enlarged room,' it was finished, you possessed me. But know that it was not without inward struggles and that many affections, already old, divided a large and profound heart. Also learn that at that time Madame du Boys was not without attractions for me, in her so ingenuously perverse naivete,—and had you not come, I should have made perhaps another little trip with her to Switzerland. Ah! but you have aped her! Sixtine, has your dignity consented to a surreptitious abduction? Send me a bouquet of violets by post!... I should have taught you the play of transcendental pleasantries, and you would have liked it. You are too serious, you really effect too much! You mistake accident for destiny; it is only a fragment. Shake off, then, the dust of eternity which illusion has sprinkled on your wings! Have you taken at least a return ticket? It is economical and gives a value to the landscape, for, without this precaution, one would never think of looking at it. 'We have plenty of time!'"
"If we had left together, we should first of all not have left at all, for what is the good of moving, since in every place one remains the same to himself. Then, as I know what to do about carnal values I should have spared you many irritating surprises. Finally ... ah! well, but is it not within my right to believe that I alone could have played the rôle?
"Before I found you, in your gestures, in the tacit consent of your good will—a consent quite momentary, it appears—my love had already found a parallel, incarnate in Guido della Preda. At this hour, his fate disquiets me seriously. Sixtine, you have a murder on your conscience (that will make two), for if I do not die it will be because Guido's death has spared my life.... Yes, he must die in my place....
"I saw you once again. The evening clothed itself in a charming minute, unique diamond whose resplendence has not left my night. It was when ... no, that is bitter. Ah! in the opening of that stone was an orient of psychic phantasmagories. It was full of softness and mildness and languor. Such moments have no morrow; also, it were better never to have lived in them. One pursues their sisters who stroll on the dial-plate, and this can lead far, to the very depths of the hells where gloomy victims lament over the nessum maggior dolore.
"In subsequent conversations, you appeared to me as a proud, intelligent and sensual amazon. Sensuality is the ferment of feminine nature: without this decisive gift, there might be angels, there would be no women. But it is quite true that I have not known how to awaken its might and my magnetism struck sudden neutralities. You are not a woman of good-will: your very pride leads you to inopportune resistance where force alone could be right! It is there that one is the dupe of one's intelligence! One must have the strength to throw it off, at certain hours, like a cloak or like the chemise of the Roman woman. For it was not the modesty which visits only extreme youth or the first ignorance: no, it was rather the intelligence. You wished to understand and feel at the same time, and for this you took pains to keep your presence of mind. See how this coincided: I, on my side, made the same effort, with less pain perhaps. Both of us knew well what we wished, and our wills, lacking a little salutary unconsciousness were destroyed in their immobile efficacy.
"Nothing more. This is sufficient enlightenment."
(This was an infraction against his habits,—but a need of personal security forced him to hurl half of himself through the window, so as to preserve the integrity of the rest: in four hours of the night he reached the final point of what he now called "a foolish anecdote.")