It was one of those sombre evenings when the sighing of the wind recalls the moaning of a dying man.  A fitful storm was brewing, and between the plashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death.  All nature suffers in such moments, the trees writhe in pain and hide their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.  I was suffering from my wound.  But a short time before I had a mistress and a friend.  The mistress had deceived me and the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain.  I could not clearly distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and puerile, the falseness of which had just been disclosed.  Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips.  He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone.  An early experience had made him bald before his time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was a materialist and he waited for death.

“Octave,” he said, “after what has happened to you, I see that you believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a word, you believe in what is said here below and not in what is done.  That is because you do not reason soundly, and it may lead you into great misfortune.

“Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.  There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus.  The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds.  Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip:  Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

“To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.