When the waltz was over I threw myself on a chair; my heart beat wildly:  “Oh, heaven!” I murmured, “how can it be possible?  Oh, superb monster!  Oh! beautiful reptile!  How you writhe, how you coil in and out, sweet adder, with supple and spotted skin!  Thy cousin the serpent has taught thee to coil about the tree of life holding between thy lips the apple of temptation.  Oh!  Melusina!  Melusina!  The hearts of men are thine.  You know it well, enchantress, with your soft languor that seems to suspect nothing!  You know very well that you ruin, that you destroy; you know that he who touches you will suffer; you know that he dies who basks in your smile, who breathes the perfume of your flowers and comes under the magic influence of your charms; that is why you abandon yourself so freely, that is why your smile is so sweet, your flowers so fresh; that is why you place your arms so gently on our shoulders.  Oh, heaven! what is your will with us?”

Professor Halle has said a terrible thing:  “Woman is the nervous part of humanity, man the muscular.”  Humboldt himself, that serious thinker, has said that an invisible atmosphere surrounds the human nerves.

I do not quote the dreamers who watch the wheeling flight of Spallanzani’s bat, and who think they have found a sixth sense in nature.  Such as nature is, her mysteries are terrible enough, her powers mighty enough—­that nature which creates us, mocks at us, and kills us—­without our seeking to deepen the shadows that surround us.  But where is the man who thinks he has lived that will deny woman’s power over us?  Has he ever taken leave of a beautiful dancer with trembling hands?  Has he ever felt that indefinable enervating magnetism which, in the midst of the dance, under the influence of music, and the warmth, making all else seem cold, that comes from a young woman, electrifying her and leaping from her to him as the perfume of aloes from the swinging censer?

I was struck with stupor.  I was familiar with that sensation similar to drunkenness which characterizes love; I knew that it was the aureole which crowned my well-beloved.  But that she should excite such heart-throbs, that she should evoke such phantoms with nothing but her beauty, her flowers, her motley costume, and a certain trick of dancing she had learned from some merry-andrew; and that without a word, without a thought, without even appearing to know it!  What was chaos, if it required seven days to make such a being?

It was not love, however, that I felt, and I do not know how to describe it unless I call it thirst.  For the first time I felt vibrating in my body a cord that was not attuned to my heart.  The sight of that beautiful animal had aroused a responsive roar from another animal in my nature.  I felt sure I could never tell that woman that I loved her, or that she pleased me, or even that she was beautiful; there was nothing on my lips but a desire to kiss her, and say to her:  “Make a girdle of those listless arms and lean that head on my breast; place that sweet smile on my lips.”  My body loved hers; I was under the influence of beauty as of wine.