Nothing touches me, nothing moves me;—I no longer feel, when I hear the story of a heroic action, the sublime shudder that used to run over me from head to foot.—Indeed, it all seems to me a little foolish.—No accent is deep enough to tighten the relaxed fibres of my heart and make them vibrate:—I look upon the tears of my fellow-mortals with the same eye that I look upon the rain, unless they are of a particularly beautiful water and the light is reflected prettily in them and they are flowing down a lovely cheek.—Dumb animals are almost the only creatures for which I have a slight remnant of compassion. I would allow a peasant or a servant to be soundly whipped, but I could not stand by and see the same treatment inflicted on a horse or dog in my presence; and yet I am not evil-minded, I have never injured anybody on earth and I probably never shall; but that is due rather to my nonchalance and my sovereign contempt for all those people whom I do not like, which does not permit me to interest myself even to the extent of injuring them.—I abhor the whole world in bulk, and there are only one or two in the whole lot whom I deem worthy to be hated specially.—To hate a person is to be as much disturbed about him as if you loved him;—it is to set him apart, to distinguish him from the common herd; it is to be in a state of violent excitement because of him; it is to think of him by day and dream of him by night; it is to bite at your pillow and gnash your teeth as you think that he exists; what more do you do for any one you love? Would you take the same amount of trouble to please a mistress that you take to ruin an enemy?—I doubt it—in order to hate one person intensely, one must be in love with some other person. Every great hatred serves as a counterpoise to a great love: and whom could I hate, when I love nobody?
My hatred is, like my love, a confused, general sentiment that seeks to apply itself to some object and cannot; I have within me a treasure of hatred and love which I don't know what to do with, and which weighs horribly upon me. If I can find no place to bestow one or the other or both of them, I shall burst and break apart, like a bag filled too full of money, which rips at the seams and spills its contents.—Oh! if I could detest some one, if one of the stupid men with whom I live would insult me in such a way as to make my old viper's blood boil in my frozen veins, and force me out of this dull drowsiness in which I am stagnating; if thou, old witch with the palsied head, wouldst bite me in the cheek with thy rat's teeth and infect me with thy venom and thy madness; if some one's death could be my life;—if the last heart-beat of an enemy writhing under my foot could send a delicious thrill through my hair, and the odor of his blood smell sweeter to my thirsty nostrils than the aroma of flowers, oh! how gladly would I renounce love, and how happy I would deem myself!
Deadly embraces, tiger-bites, the hug of a boa-constrictor, an elephant's foot placed upon a breast that is crushed and flattened beneath it, the poisoned tail of the scorpion, the milky juice of the Euphorbia, the curved kris of the Javanese, blades that gleam at night and extinguish their gleam in blood—I call upon you now, it is you who shall replace for me the leafless roses, the moist kisses and the warm embrace of love!
I love nothing, as I have said, but alas! I am afraid of loving something.—It would be a hundred thousand times better to hate than to have such a love!—I have found the type of beauty that I have so long dreamed of.—I have found the body of my phantom; I have seen it, it has spoken to me, I have touched its hand, it exists; it is not a chimera. I knew that I could not be mistaken and that my presentiments never lied.—Yes, Silvio, lam living beside the dream of my life;—my chamber is here, its chamber is there; I can see from here the curtain trembling at its window, and the light of its lamp. Its shadow has just passed across the curtain: in an hour we shall sup together.
Those lovely Turkish eyelashes, that clear, profound gaze, that warm hue of pale amber, that long glossy black hair, that nose, of proud and delicate shape, those joints and extremities, supple and slender after the manner of Palmegiani, the graceful curves and the pure oval contour that give such an air of aristocratic refinement to a face—all that I longed for and would have been overjoyed to find distributed among five or six persons, I have found united in a single person!
The thing that I adore most fervently among all earthly things is a lovely hand.—If you could see the hand of my dream! such perfection! such dazzling whiteness! such soft skin! such penetrating moisture! the ends of the fingers so admirably tapered! the half-moon of the nails so clearly marked! such polish and such brilliant color! you would say they were the inner petals of a rose;—Anne of Austria's hands, so vaunted and famous, were no more than the hands of a turkey-keeper or scullery-maid compared with these.—And then what grace, what art in the slightest movements of the hand! how gracefully the little finger bends and stays a little apart from its tall brothers!—The thought of that hand drives me mad and makes my lips quiver and burn.—I close my eyes to avoid looking at it; but with its delicate fingers it seizes my eyelashes and raises the lids, causing countless visions of ivory and snow to pass before me.
Ah! doubtless it is Satan's claw gloved in that satin skin; it is some mocking demon making sport of me; there is witchcraft in it.—It is too monstrously impossible.
That hand—I propose to go to Italy, to see the pictures of the great masters, to study, compare, draw, become a painter in short, in order to be able to reproduce it as it is, as I see it, as I feel it; it will perhaps serve the purpose of ridding me of this sort of obsession.
I longed for beauty; I did not know what I asked for.—It is like trying to look at the sun without eyelids, it is like trying to handle flames.—I suffer horribly.—To be unable to assimilate this perfection, to be unable to pass into it and to cause it to pass into me, to have no means of reproducing it and of making it feel!—When I see anything beautiful, I want to touch it with my whole self, everywhere and at the same time. I want to sing of it and paint it, to carve it and write of it, to be loved by it as I love it; I want what cannot be and never can be.
Your letter made me ill—very ill—forgive me for saying it.—All the pure, tranquil happiness that you enjoy, the walks in the reddening woods,—the long conversations, so affectionate and tender, that end with a chaste kiss on the forehead; the serene, isolated life; the days that pass so quickly that night seems to come before its time, make the constant internal agitation in which I live seem even more tempestuous.—So you are to be married in two months; all the obstacles are removed, you are sure now of belonging to each other forever. Your present felicity is augmented by all the happiness in store for you. You are happy and you are certain of being happier soon.—What a destiny is yours!—Your beloved is beautiful, but what you have loved in her is not the mortal, palpable beauty, material beauty, but the invisible, immortal beauty, the beauty that does not grow old, the beauty of the soul.—She is full of charm and innocence; she loves you as such souls know how to love.—You never looked to see if the golden shade of her hair resembled the golden hair painted by Rubens or Giorgione; but it pleased you because it was her hair. I will wager, happy lover that you are, that you have no idea whether your mistress is of the Grecian or Asiatic type, English or Italian.—O Silvio! how rare are the hearts that are content with pure and simple love and desire neither a hermitage in the forest nor a garden on an island in Lago Maggiore.