“You will come again soon, won’t you?”

“Yes....  Yes.”

He returned to the fireside.

“Oof! it’s done,” he thought, in a whirl of confused emotions.  His vanity was satisfied, his selfesteem was no longer bleeding, he had attained his ends and possessed this woman.  Moreover, her spell over him had lost its force.  He was regaining his entire liberty of mind, but who could tell what trouble this liaison had yet in store for him?  Then, in spite of everything, he softened.

After all, what could he reproach her with?  She loved as well as she could.  She was, indeed, ardent and plaintive.  Even this dualism of a mistress who was a low cocotte in bed and a fine lady when dressed—­or no, too intelligent to be called a fine lady—­was a delectable pimento.  Her carnal appetites were excessive and bizarre.  What, then, was the matter with him?

And at last he quite justly accused himself.  It was his own fault if everything was spoiled.  He lacked appetite.  He was not really tormented except by a cerebral erethism.  He was used up in body, filed away in soul, inept at love, weary of tendernesses even before he received them and disgusted when he had.  His heart was dead and could not be revived.  And his mania for thinking, thinking! previsualizing an incident so vividly that actual enactment was an anticlimax—­but probably would not be if his mind would leave him alone and not be always jeering at his efforts.  For a man in his state of spiritual impoverishment all, save art, was but a recreation more or less boring, a diversion more or less vain.  “Ah, poor woman, I am afraid she is going to get pretty sick of me.  If only she would consent to come no more!  But no, she doesn’t deserve to be treated in that fashion,” and, seized by pity, he swore to himself that the next time she visited him he would caress her and try to persuade her that the disillusion which he had so ill concealed did not exist.

He tried to spread up the bed, get the tousled blankets together, and plump the pillows, then he lay down.

He put out his lamp.  In the darkness his distress increased.  With death in his heart he said to himself, “Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.

“To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France—­to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that’s the dream!  These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count.  Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death:  ah, that is something like it.  A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return.  As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable.  Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”