Then the screen showed us the woman's face; and words cannot depict
the expression of joy and headlong love that turned this face, which
was neither very beautiful nor very young, into something more alive
with youth and beauty than anything in this world.
After that, the lovers flung themselves into each others' arms, as
though their lives, too long separated, were striving to make but one.
Their lips united.
We saw nothing more of the French officer and his Italian lover. A new
picture followed, less bright but equally clear, the picture of a
long, battlemented rampart, marked with a series of round,
machicolated towers. Below and in the centre, among the ruins of a
bastion, were trees growing in a semicircle around an ancient
oak-tree.
Gradually, from the shade of the trees, there stepped into the
sunlight a quite young girl, clad in the pointed head-dress of the
fifteenth century and a full-skirted gown trailing along the ground.
She stopped with her hands open and raised on high. She saw something
that we were unable to see. She wore a bewitching smile. Her eyes were
half-closed; and her slender figure seemed to sway as she waited.
What she was awaiting was the arrival of a young page, who came to
her and kissed her lips while she flung herself on his shoulder.
This enamoured couple certainly moved us, as the first couple had
done, by reason of the passion and the languor that possessed them,
but even more by reason of the thought that they were an actual
couple, living, before our eyes and at the present day, their real
life of long ago. Our sensations were no longer such as we experienced
at the earlier exhibitions. They had then been full of hesitation and
ignorance. We now knew. In this late period of the world's existence,
we were beholding the life of human beings of the fifteenth century.
They were not repeating for our entertainment actions which had been
performed before. They were performing them for the first occasion in
time and space. It was their first kiss of love.
This, the feeling that one is seeing _this_, is a feeling which
surpasses everything that can be imagined! To see a fifteenth-century
page and damsel kissing each other on the lips!
To see, as we saw immediately afterwards, a Greek hill! To see the
Acropolis standing against its sky of two thousand years ago, with its
houses and gardens, its palm-trees, its lanes, its vestibules and
temples, the Parthenon, not in ruins, but in all its splendour and
perfection! A host of statues surround it. Men and women climb its
stairways. And these men and women are Athenians of the time of
Pericles or Demosthenes!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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