Observe this little torso of a woman; it is a little Venus. It is broken; it has no longer a head, arms, legs, yet I never weary of contemplating it; each day, each hour for me adds to this masterpiece because I only understand it better. What could it say to our indifferent glance? For me it has the ineffable voluptuousness of softly maturing flesh. The effect lies in no part and in every part. It is perfection. This little childish body, has it not all the charm of woman? It does not catch the light, the light catches it, glancing over it lightly; without any effect of roughness, any dark shadow. Here shadow can no longer be called shadow but only the decline of light. She does not become dark, she grows pale in imperceptible depressions, in delicious undulations. She is indivisible; she is whole or incomplete, but her unity is not disturbed. And this passage that joins the abdomen to the thighs, this little declivity of graces, this valley of love! Everything is full of the calm, the lightness, the serenity of pure beauty in the perfect confidence of nature. The ideal that you imagine you find in a gesture, in a momentary attitude, is here; it is here because of the infinite love of the flesh, of the human fruit. What you call the ideal is nothing but the perfume of beautiful modeling. What more could you ask? When I look at this marble in the evening by candle-light, how the wonder deepens! If those who have been telling us for a hundred years that Greek art is cold studied it with care, could they for one hour maintain this absurdity? This sculpture, on the contrary, is of an extraordinary living complexity, which the flame reveals; the whole surface is nothing but depressions and reliefs, but united, melted together in the great, harmonious force of the _ensemble_. I turn the little torso about under the caressing rays of the light. There is not a fault, not a weakness, not a dead spot; it is the very continuity of life, its intoxicating voluptuousness hidden in the bosom of the molecule. Why should such artists have sought to create an abstract Beauty by the idealization of forms? These men of genius loved Nature too well to presume to correct her. They knew well that despite their genius, they still remained beneath her. Nothing can surpass the marvel of creation. The conception of an idealistic art comes from the Academy. Before the purity of the antique forms people used to believe that the beauty lay solely in the exterior profiles. It is really beautiful because of the interior modeling. And still we make this distinction between the profiles and the modeling, thanks to our mania for dividing things; but we know that the one is inseparable from the other; the surfaces are nothing but the extremities of volumes, the boundaries of the mass.