The only wrong I have done her consists in being myself. If I told her that, the child would reply at once that that is my greatest merit in her eyes; which would be more courteous than sensible.
Once—it was in the beginning of our liaison—I believed that I had gained my end, for a moment I believed that I loved her—I did love her.—O my friend, I have never lived except during that moment, and if it had lasted an hour I should have become a god. We had ridden out together in the saddle, I on my dear Ferragus, she on a snow-white mare that looks like a unicorn, her feet are so delicate and her body so slender. We rode along a broad avenue of elms of prodigious height; the sun poured down upon us, bright and warm, sifting through the serrated foliage; ultra-marine patches showed here and there amid the fleecy clouds, broad bands of pale blue lay along the horizon, changing to a most delicate apple-green when they encountered the golden rays of the setting sun. The appearance of the sky was unusual and fascinating; the breeze wafted to our nostrils an indefinable perfume of wild flowers delicious beyond words. From time to time a bird rose in front of us and flew singing along the avenue. The church-bell of an invisible village softly rang the Angelus, and the silvery notes, which came but faintly to our ears because of the distance, were inexpressibly sweet. Our horses were going at a foot pace, and they walked side by side in such perfect step that neither of them was an inch ahead of the other.—My heart dilated and my soul overflowed upon my body. I had never been so happy. I did not speak, nor did Rosette, and yet we never understood each other so perfectly. We were so close together that my leg touched her horse's side. I leaned toward her and put my arm about her waist; she made a similar movement and rested her head against my shoulder. Our mouths met; O such a chaste, delicious kiss! Our horses walked on, the reins lying on their necks. I felt Rosette's arms relax and her body yield more and more. I knew that my own strength was failing me, and I was near fainting.—Ah! I promise you that at that moment I cared but little whether I was myself or somebody else. We rode in that way to the end of the avenue, where the sound of footsteps caused us abruptly to resume our natural positions; some of our acquaintances, also in the saddle, rode up and spoke to us. If I had had my pistols, I believe I should have fired at them.
I glared at them with a fierce, lowering expression that must have seemed very strange to them. After all, I was wrong to be so angry with them, for they had unwittingly done me the service of cutting my pleasure short at the moment when, by its very intensity, it was certain to become pain or to sink under its violence. The science of stopping in time is not regarded with all the respect it deserves.—Sometimes, as you lie with a woman, you put your arm under her waist: at first it is a most blissful sensation to feel the pleasant warmth of her body, the soft, velvety flesh of her sides, the polished ivory of her hips, and to press your hand against her breast which throbs and quivers. The fair one falls asleep in that voluptuous, charming posture; the curve of her loins becomes less pronounced, the agitation of her bosom is calmed, her sides rise and fall with the freer, more regular respiration of sleep, her muscles relax, her face is hidden by her hair.—Meanwhile the weight upon your arm grows heavier, you begin to observe that she is a woman, not a sylph; but you would not remove your arm for anything on earth. There are many reasons for that: the first is that it is dangerous to wake a woman with whom one is lying; one must be prepared to substitute for the blissful dream she is probably dreaming, a more blissful reality; the second is that, if you ask her to raise herself so that you can take away your arm, you tell her indirectly that she is heavy and discommodes you—which is not polite—or else you give her to understand that you are feeble and overdone—an extremely humiliating admission for you and likely to lower you greatly in her mind; the third is that, as you have had pleasure in that position, you think that if you retain the position the pleasure may be renewed, wherein you are mistaken. The poor arm is caught under the mass that crushes it, the blood is checked, the nerves are distended and numbness pricks you with its countless needles: you are a sort of Milo of Crotona on a small scale, and the mattress and the back of your divinity are a sufficiently accurate representation of the two parts of the tree that have reunited. Day comes at last to deliver you from your martyrdom and you leap out of that instrument of torture more eagerly than ever husband descended from the nuptial scaffold.
That is the history of many passions. It is the history of all pleasures.
However that may be—despite the interruption or because of the interruption—never had such a blissful sensation fallen to my lot: I felt that I was really somebody else. Rosette's soul in its entirety had entered into my body. My soul had left me and filled her heart as hers had filled mine. They had met, no doubt, during that long equestrian kiss, as Rosette dubbed it afterward—to my annoyance by the way—and had penetrated and mingled as inextricably as the souls of two mortal creatures can upon a morsel of perishable clay.
Angels surely must kiss like that, and the real paradise is not in heaven but on the lips of the woman we love.
I have waited in vain for such a moment and have tried unsuccessfully to lead up to a repetition of it. We have often ridden together through the avenue of elms at sunset on lovely evenings; the trees had the same verdure, the birds sang the same song, but to us the sun seemed dull, the foliage withered: the song of the birds had a harsh, discordant sound, we were no longer in harmony with it all. We brought our horses to a walk and we tried the same kiss.—Alas! only our lips met and it was only the spectre of the former kiss.—The beautiful, the sublime, the divine, the only real kiss I have given and received in my whole life had flown away forever. Since that day I have always had an inexpressibly sad feeling on returning from the forest. Rosette, light-hearted madcap that she naturally is, cannot avoid the feeling and her reverie betrays itself by a sweet little pout, which is at least as attractive as a smile.
Scarcely anything but the fumes of wine and a great blaze of candles enable me to shake off these fits of depression. We both drink like men condemned to death, silently and glass after glass, until we have swallowed the necessary amount; then we begin to laugh and mock most heartily at what we call our sentimentality.
We laugh—because we cannot weep. Ah! who will succeed in sowing a tear in my parched eye?
Why did I enjoy that evening so? It would be very hard for me to say. I was the same man, Rosette the same woman. It was not my first experience on horse-back, nor hers; we had already watched the sun set and the spectacle had touched us no more than a picture, which one admires or not according as the colors are more or less brilliant. There is more than one avenue of elms and chestnuts in the world, and that was not the first one we had ridden through; what then caused us to find such a sovereign fascination there, what metamorphosed the dead leaves into topazes, the green leaves into emeralds, gilded all those whirling atoms and changed into pearls all the drops of water scattered over the greensward, what imparted such sweet melody to the tones of a bell that was usually discordant and to the twittering of countless young birds?—There must have been a very penetrating flavor of poesy in the air, as even our horses seemed to catch the scent of it.