“Ah! then I shall be no more!  You will listen to him, faithless one!  You will blush as does the budding rose, and the blood of youth will mount to your face.  While saying that your heart is sealed, you will allow it to escape through that fresh aureole of beauty, each ray of which allures a kiss.  How much they desire to be loved who say they love no more!  And why should that astonish you?  You are a woman; that body, that spotless bosom, you know what they are worth; when you conceal them under your dress you do not believe, as do the virgins, that all are alike, and you know the price of your modesty.  How can a woman who has been praised resolve to be praised no more?  Does she think she is living when she remains in the shadow and there is silence round about her beauty?  Her beauty itself is the admiring glance of her lover.  No, no, there can be no doubt of it; she who has loved, can not live without love; she who has seen death clings to life.  Brigitte loves me and will perhaps die of love; I will kill myself and another will have her.

“Another, another!” I repeated, bending over her until my head touched her shoulder.  “Is she not a widow?  Has she not already seen death?  Have not these little hands prepared the dead for burial?  Her tears for the second will not flow as long as those shed for the first.  Ah!  God forgive me!  While she sleeps why should I not kill her?  If I should awaken her now and tell her that her hour had come, and that we were going to die with a last kiss, she would consent.  What does it matter?  Is it certain that all does not end with that?”

I found a knife on the table and I picked it up.

“Fear, cowardice, superstition!  What do they know about it who talk of something else beyond?  It is for the ignorant common people that a future life has been invented, but who really believes in it?  What watcher in the cemetery has seen Death leave his tomb and hold consultation with a priest?  In olden times there were phantoms; they are interdicted by the police in civilized cities, and no cries are now heard issuing from the earth except from those buried in haste.  Who has silenced death, if it has ever spoken?  Because funeral processions are no longer permitted to encumber our streets, does the celestial spirit languish?

“To die, that is the final purpose, the end.  God has established it, man discusses it; but over every door is written:  ’Do what thou wilt, thou shalt die.’  What will be said if I kill Brigitte?  Neither of us will hear.  In to-morrow’s journal would appear the intelligence that Octave de T-----had killed his mistress, and the day after no one would speak of it.  Who would follow us to the grave?  No one who, upon returning to his home, could not enjoy a hearty dinner; and when we were extended side by side in our narrow, bed, the world could walk over our graves without disturbing us.