The Fortune of the Rougons eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 466 pages of information about The Fortune of the Rougons.

The Fortune of the Rougons eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 466 pages of information about The Fortune of the Rougons.
who hangs on a youth’s neck is already a woman, a woman unconsciously, whom a caress may awaken to conscious womanhood.  When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another’s lips.  Lovers are made by a kiss.  It was on that dark and cold December night, amid the bitter wailing of the tocsin, that Miette and Silvere exchanged one of those kisses that bring all the heart’s blood to the lips.

They remained silent, close to one another.  A gentle glow soon penetrated them, languor overcame them, and steeped them in feverish drowsiness.  They were quite warm at last, and lights seemed to flit before their closed eyelids, while a buzzing mounted to their brains.  This state of painful ecstasy, which lasted some minutes, seemed endless to them.  Then, in a kind of dream, their lips met.  The kiss they exchanged was long and greedy.  It seemed to them as if they had never kissed before.  Yet their embrace was fraught with suffering and they released one another.  And the chilliness of the night having cooled their fever, they remained in great confusion at some distance one from the other.

Meantime the bells were keeping up their sinister converse in the dark abyss which surrounded the young people.  Miette, trembling and frightened, did not dare to draw near to Silvere again.  She did not even know if he were still there, for she could no longer hear him move.  The stinging sweetness of their kiss still clung to their lips, to which passionate phrases surged, and they longed to kiss once more.  But shame restrained them from the expression of any such desire.  They felt that they would rather never taste that bliss again than speak of it aloud.  If their blood had not been lashed by their rapid march, if the darkness had not offered complicity, they would, for a long time yet, have continued kissing each other on the cheeks like old playfellows.  Feelings of modesty were coming to Miette.  She remembered Justin’s coarseness.  A few hours previously she had listened, without a blush, to that fellow who called her a shameless girl.  She had wept without understanding his meaning, she had wept simply because she guessed that what he spoke of must be base.  Now that she was becoming a woman, she wondered in a last innocent transport whether that kiss, whose burning smart she could still feel, would not perhaps suffice to cover her with the shame to which her cousin had referred.  Thereupon she was seized with remorse, and burst into sobs.

“What is the matter; why are you crying?” asked Silvere in an anxious voice.

“Oh, leave me,” she faltered, “I do not know.”

Then in spite of herself, as it were, she continued amidst her tears:  “Ah! what an unfortunate creature I am!  When I was ten years old people used to throw stones at me.  To-day I am treated as the vilest of creatures.  Justin did right to despise me before everybody.  We have been doing wrong, Silvere.”

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Project Gutenberg
The Fortune of the Rougons from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.