“When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music.  In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed:  she dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love.  It was dreadful.  I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and—­oh!  I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome....  I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the pure air.  Oh, nature is disgusting; it takes beauty and defiles it:  it defaces the ivory-white body we have adored, with the vile cicatrices of maternity:  it befouls the altar of the soul.

“How can you talk of such intimacy as love?  How can you idealise it?  Love is not possible to the artist unless it is sterile.”

“All her suffering did not endear her to you?” I asked in amazement; “did not call forth that pity in you which you used to speak of as divine?”

“Pity, Frank,” he exclaimed impatiently; “pity has nothing to do with love.  How can one desire what is shapeless, deformed, ugly?  Desire is killed by maternity; passion buried in conception,” and he flung away from the table.

At length I understood his dominant motive:  trahit sua quemque voluptas, his Greek love of form, his intolerant cult of physical beauty, could take no heed of the happiness or well-being of the beloved.

“I will not talk to you about it, Frank; I am like a Persian, who lives by warmth and worships the sun, talking to some Esquimau, who answers me with praise of blubber and nights spent in ice houses and baths of foul vapour.  Let’s talk of something else.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[27] He lived till November, 1910.

CHAPTER XXIV

A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days, leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly happy, with good food, excellent champagne, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.

When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered for the worse.  There was an Englishman of a good class named M——­ staying at the hotel.  He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or eighteen whom he called his servant.  Oscar wanted to know if I minded meeting him.

“He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much:  you won’t mind his dining with us, will you?”

“Of course not,” I replied.  But when I saw M——­ I thought him an insignificant, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration for Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for he had hardly any brains of his own.  He had, however, a certain liking for the poetry and literature of passion.[28]

To my astonishment Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at some place he had in Switzerland.  This support made Oscar recalcitrant to any influence I might have had over him.  When I asked him if he had written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually: