The flowers just mentioned, these flowers which adorn the vestibule of my mysterious passions, are my servants and not my favorites.

They salute me by the change of their color and by their first inhalations.  They are darlings, coquettes, arranged in eight rows to the right, eight rows, the left, and so laid out that they look like two gardens springing up from under my feet.

My heart palpitates, my eyes flash at the sight of them; my blood rushes through my veins, my soul is elated, and my hands tremble from desire as soon as I touch them.  I pass on.  There are three closed doors at the bottom of that gallery.  I can make my choice of them.  I have three harems.

But I enter most often the habitation of the orchids, my little wheedlers, by preference.  Their chamber is low, suffocating.  The humid and hot air make the skin moist, takes away the breath and causes the fingers to quiver.  They come, these strange girls, from a country marshy, burning and unhealthy.  They draw you towards them as do the sirens, are as deadly as poison, admirably fantastic, enervating, dreadful.  The butterflies here would also seem to have enormous wings, tiny feet, and eyes!  Yes! they have also eyes!  They look at me, they see me, prodigious, incomparable beings, fairies, daughters of the sacred earth, of the impalpable air, and of hot sun rays, that mother bountiful of the universe.  Yes, they have wings, they have eyes, and nuances that no painter could imitate, every charm, every grace, every form that one could dream of.  These wombs are transverse, odoriferous and transparent, ever open for love and more tempting than all the flesh of women.  The unimaginable designs of their little bodies inebriates the soul, and transports it to a paradise of images and of voluptuous ideals.  They tremble upon their stems as though they would fly.  When they do fly do they come to me?  No, it is my heart that hovers o’er them, like a mystic male, tortured by love.

No wing of any animal can keep pace with them.  We are alone, they and I, in the lighted prison which I have constructed for them.  I regard them, I contemplate them, I admire them, I adore them, the one after the other.

How healthy, strong and rosy, a rosiness that moistens the lips of desire!  How I love them!  The border is frizzled, paler than their throat, where the carolla hides itself away; a mysterious mouth, seductive sugar under the tongue, exhibiting and unveiling the delicate, admirable and sacred organs of these divine little creatures which smell so exquisitely and do not speak.

I sometimes have a passion for some of them that lasts as long as their existence, which only embraces a few days and nights.  I then have them taken away from the common gallery and enclosed in a pretty glass cabin, in which there murmurs a jet of water over against a tropical gazon, which has been brought from one of the Pacific Islands.  And I remain close to it, ardent, feverish and tormented, knowing that its death is near, and watch it fading away, while that in thought, I possess it, aspire to its love, drink it in, and then pluck its short life with an inexpressible caress.