It seemed to me—­it may possibly have been an illusion—­that at the announcement of the so-called title of my so-called novel, a smile and a shadow flitted over Fauchery’s eyes and mouth.  A vision of the two young women I had met in the hall came back to me.  Was the author of so many great masterpieces of analysis about to live a new book before writing it?  I had no time to answer this question, for, with a glance at an onyx vase containing some cigarettes of Turkish tobacco, he offered me one, lighted one himself and began first to question, then to reply to me.  I listened while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works.  He was the first of the great writers of our day whom I had thus approached on something like terms of intimacy.  As we talked I observed the strange similarity between his spoken and his written words.  I admired the charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of imagination, his superabundant intelligence, the liveliness of his impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.

“There is no such thing as an age for love,” he said in substance, “because the man capable of loving—­in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation—­never ceases to love.  I will go further; he never ceases to love the same person.  You know the experiment that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness consisted?  He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood, then he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other.  In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type.  Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life we should discover that all these women resembled one another.  The most inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or even twenty different embodiments.  The main point is to find out at what age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image they have constantly borne within themselves.  For them that would be the age for love.

“The age for being loved?” he continued.  “The deepest of all the passions I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my masters, a poet, and he was sixty years old at the time.  It is true that he still held himself as erect as a young man, he came and went with a step as light as yours, he conversed like Rivarol, he composed verses as beautiful as De Vigny’s.  He was besides very poor, very lonely and very unhappy, having lost one after another, his wife and his children.  You remember the words of Shakespeare’s Moor:  ’She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.’