A most singular and heartrending voluptuousness of love is to feel that everything leaves us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems as though we were witnessing a satanic phantasmagoria in which we behold limbs, organs, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running madly toward a new center, where a new organism is being moulded with our remains. Even time appears to be ours no longer, since it is no longer measured by the watch, but by the impatience of desire or the flashes of voluptuousness; thought, too, no longer belongs to us, as it is tyrannically ruled by one image alone. To find ourselves again, to remember that we have still intimate relations with the man of yesterday, we must go and seek another creature who has robbed us of everything. Hence a vague unrest which invades the body, the senses and the thoughts of every lover; hence the undertaking, most difficult even for the ablest dissembler, to conceal the new god who invades and penetrates every part of us. Every hair, every pore, every nerve, every part of the epidermis of the man who loves sings and says to the universe of the living: "I love, and who loves me?" Day and night, in the calm and in the storm, all the nature of a lover sings its note until another song responds in the same tone. Not a moment of peace, not an instant of truce, until the new energy has found a sister energy. Love is like the sea: here it is as calm as the surface of an Alpine lake, still and smooth as a sheet of lead; but there, among the rocks or upon the coast, it is eternally in motion, and, roaring or sighing, howling or caressing, agitates with incessant motion the land it kisses. Man and woman who meet and love are the sea and the land, which are perpetually at war--a war in turn sweet and bitter, tender and cruel, voluptuous and merciless. Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of white linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to her work! She seems, between one stitch and another, to be meditating on the solution of the quadrature of the circle, so absorbed is she in her arduous task. But if I only could write the volume of thoughts that pass through her brain between two stitches! She is fishing in the deep abysses of love. And at a short distance thence, she unaware of it, a young man, too, is at the window, his hair disheveled, his hands firmly thrust into his pockets, his breast swelling as by a threat. He has been staring at the sky for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous problem of the proletariate or on that of human liberty? Is he, perhaps, dreaming of glory, of wealth? No; he, too, is fishing in the deep abysses of love.