There! Empty your milk-jug and I will empty my bottle. The wine smells of hyacinth. It is a revelation. Her hair smells of violets, but it is the delicate odour of hyacinth that came from her bare young arms when she clasped them round my neck; et sa peau, on dirait du satin. Carlotta is in the wine, Carlotta with her sorcery and her laughter and her youth, and I drink Carlotta.
“Quo me rapis Bacche pienum tui?”
To such a land of dreams, my one-eyed friend, as never before have I visited. You yawn? You are bored? I shoot the dregs of my glass into his distended jaws. He springs away spitting and coughing, and I lie back in my chair convulsed with inextinguishable laughter.
October 2d.
I have suffered all day from a racking headache, having awakened at six o’clock and crept shivering to bed. I realise that Pommery and Greno are not demi-gods at all, but mere commercial purveyors of a form of alcohol, a quart of which it is injudicious to imbibe, with a one-eyed tom-cat as boon companion, at two o’clock in the morning:
But I am unrepentant. If I committed follies last night, so much the better. I struggle no longer against the inevitable, when the inevitable is the crown and joy of earthly things. For in sober truth I love her infinitely.
October 6th.
She comes back to-morrow. Antoinette and I have been devising a welcome. The good soul has filled the house with flowers, and, usurping Stenson’s functions, has polished furniture and book backs and silver and has hung fresh blinds and scrubbed and scoured until I am afraid to walk about or sit down lest I should tarnish the spotless brightness of my surroundings.
“You have forgotten one thing, Antoinette,” I remarked, satirically. “You have omitted to strew the front steps with rose-leaves.”
“I would cover them with my body for the dear angel to walk upon as she entered,” said Antoinette.