In their life together, pleasant and intimate as it was, there was
something lacking. These conversations on the serious topics of being or
non-being, their exchange of ideas on the analysis of humanity, their
inquiries into the final end of the existence of things, satisfied their
minds sometimes, but not their hearts. When they had been together for a
long time, talking under the garden trellis which towered above the
picture of the great city, or in the silent library, the student, the
thinker could not leave his companion; they sat hand in hand, mute,
attracted and repelled by an irresistible power. After leaving each
other, both felt a singular, painful void in their breasts, an
indefinable uneasiness, as though some link necessary for both their
lives had been broken; and each hoped for nothing but the hour of
meeting. He loved her, not for himself, but for herself, with an almost
impersonal affection, with a feeling of high esteem as well as ardent
love; and by a constantly fought combat with his desire he had been able
to resist it. But one day, when they were both sitting on the wide divan
in the library, strewn, as usual, with books and loose leaves, a silence
fell upon them, and it happened that, overcome perhaps by the weight of
his long-continued efforts to resist so powerful an attraction, the
young author's head insensibly drooped to his companion's shoulder, and
almost at once ... their lips met....
Oh, unutterable joys of requited love; insatiable intoxication of the
heart transported with happiness; never-ending delights of the uncurbed
imagination; sweet music of the heart,--to what ethereal heights have
you not raised the chosen ones, given up to your supreme felicities!
Suddenly forgetful of this lower world, they fly on outstretched wings
to some enchanted paradise, lose themselves in celestial depths, and
soar away to the sublime regions of eternal rapture. The world, with its
joys and its sorrows, no longer exists for them; they live in light, in
fire,--they are salamanders, phoenixes, freed from all weight, light as
flame, burning themselves out, rising again from their ashes, always
luminous, always ardent, invulnerable, invincible.
The expansion of their first long-repressed delights threw the lovers
into an ecstatic existence in which metaphysics and its problems were
for a time forgotten. This lasted six months. The sweetest but most
imperious of feelings had suddenly absorbed and taken possession of
them, thus completing the insufficient intellectual satisfactions of the
mind. From the day of the kiss, George Spero not only entirely
disappeared from society, but even ceased to write; and I lost sight of
him myself, notwithstanding the long and true affection he had professed
for me. Logicians might have been able to conclude from this that for
the first time in his life he was satisfied that he had found the
solution of the great problem,--the supreme object of the existence of
beings.
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