The Novelist For Whom Man And Nature Are Inseparable With Profound Respect For The Classical Dignity Of His Aim And Equal Admiration For The Austere Splendour Of His Performance
CONTENTS
‘How I have wept, the long night through, over the poor women of the
past, so beautiful, so tender, so sweet, whose arms have opened for the
kiss, and who are dead! The kiss—it is immortal! It passes from lip to
lip, from century to century, from age to age. Men gather it, give it
back, and die.‘—GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
For years I had been preoccupied with thoughts of love—and by love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in amorous dreams.
I, in my modern costume, sat down between two pairs of candles to the piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me: warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned ro