Very frequently pretty women have not intellect to correspond with their personal charms.  Now, the slightest lack of harmony strikes me and pains me at the first glance.  In friendship this is not of importance.  Friendship is a compact in which one fairly shares defects and merits.  We may judge of friends, whether man or woman, giving them credit for what is good, and overlooking what is bad in them, appreciating them at their just value, while giving ourselves up to an intimate, intense and charming sympathy.

In order to love, one must be blind, surrender one’s self absolutely, see nothing, question nothing, understand nothing.  One must adore the weakness as well as the beauty of the beloved object, renounce all judgment, all reflection, all perspicacity.

I am incapable of such blindness and rebel at unreasoning subjugation.  This is not all.  I have such a high and subtle idea of harmony that nothing can ever fulfill my ideal.  But you will call me a madman.  Listen to me.  A woman, in my opinion, may have an exquisite soul and charming body without that body and that soul being in perfect harmony with one another.  I mean that persons who have noses made in a certain shape should not be expected to think in a certain fashion.  The fat have no right to make use of the same words and phrases as the thin.  You, who have blue eyes, madame, cannot look at life and judge of things and events as if you had black eyes.  The shade of your eyes should correspond, by a sort of fatality, with the shade of your thought.  In perceiving these things, I have the scent of a bloodhound.  Laugh if you like, but it is so.

And yet, once I imagined that I was in love for an hour, for a day.  I had foolishly yielded to the influence of surrounding circumstances.  I allowed myself to be beguiled by a mirage of Dawn.  Would you like me to tell you this short story?

I met, one evening, a pretty, enthusiastic little woman who took a poetic fancy to spend a night with me in a boat on a river.  I would have preferred a room and a bed; however, I consented to the river and the boat.

It was in the month of June.  My fair companion chose a moonlight night in order the better to stimulate her imagination.

We had dined at a riverside inn and set out in the boat about ten o’clock.  I thought it a rather foolish kind of adventure, but as my companion pleased me I did not worry about it.  I sat down on the seat facing her; I seized the oars, and off we starred.

I could not deny that the scene was picturesque.  We glided past a wooded isle full of nightingales, and the current carried us rapidly over the river covered with silvery ripples.  The tree toads uttered their shrill, monotonous cry; the frogs croaked in the grass by the river’s bank, and the lapping of the water as it flowed on made around us a kind of confused murmur almost imperceptible, disquieting, and gave us a vague sensation of mysterious fear.