NIGHT fell. The reeds, like distaffs and daggers, rattled in their fields. The feathered caravan of moorhens, ducks, kingfishers, and snipe cooed and quieted. The pond lapped against its shores. Autumn’s great voices were whispering from the marsh and the woods. I ran my boat aground and returned to the castle. Ten hours sounded on the clock. The second I entered my room, I threw open my windows, fixed my gaze upon the sky, and began to recite an incantation. I levitated to the clouds with my fair magician. Wrapped in her hair and veils, I went wherever the storms willed me, stirring the treetops, shaking the mountain peaks, whirling over the seas. I plunged through space and descended from the throne of God to the gates of the Abyss. Worlds were delivered unto the strength of my passions. Amid this chaos of elements, I drunkenly wed my thoughts of danger with my thoughts of pleasure. The breath of the boreal wind brought me voluptuous sighs. The murmur of the rain invited me to lay my head on a woman’s bosom. The words I spoke to this woman would have given old age back its senses and warmed the marble of a tomb. All-ignorant and all-knowing, simultaneously virgin and lover, innocent Eve and fallen Eve, my enchantress nourished my madness with a mixture of mystery and passion. I placed her on an altar and worshipped her. The pride of being loved by her increased my love twice over. When she walked, I prostrated myself so that I could be trampled beneath her feet and kiss her footsteps. I was troubled by her smile; I trembled at the sound of her voice; I shuddered with longing if I touched what she had touched. The air exhaled from her moist mouth penetrated the marrow of my bones and flowed in my veins instead of blood. A single glance from her sent me flying to the ends of the earth. What desert would not have been enough for me, as long as she was there? At her side, the lion’s den would have been transformed into a palace, and thousands of centuries would have been too short to exhaust the fires by which I felt myself enflamed.
In this frenzy, there was an element of moral idolatry: by another caprice of my imagination, this Phryne who clasped me in her arms was also Glory and, above all, Honor. Virtue performing its noblest deeds or Genius giving birth to its rarest thought could hardly give an idea of this imaginary happiness. I discovered in my marvelous creation all the blandishments of the senses and all the delectations of the soul. Overwhelmed, as though submerged by these double delights, I no longer knew which was my true existence. I was a man and not a man. I became a cloud, a wind, a noise; I was pure spirit, an aerial being that chanted songs of rapture: I stripped myself of my own nature in order to merge with the daughter of my desires, to transform myself into her, to touch her beauty the more intimately, to be at the same time passion received and passion given, the love and the object of love.
And then suddenly, struck by my folly, I would throw myself on my bed; I would wallow in my desolation; I would water my sheets with burning tears that no one witnessed and that flowed miserably, for a nonexistent being.