Under the long tulle veil, which almost covered her,
with the symbolical orange flowers on her bright,
light hair, in her white dress, with her downcast
eyes and her graceful figure, Elaine looked to me like
a Psyche, whose innocent heart was vowed to
love. I felt how vain and artificial all this
form was, how little this show counted before this
Kiss, the triumphant, revealing, maddening Kiss,
which rivets the flesh of the wife to the lips and
all the flesh of the husband, which turns the Immaculate
youth of the virgin into a woman, and consecrates
it to tender caresses, to dreams and to future ecstacies,
through the sufferings of a rape.
Elaine loves me, as much as I adore her.
She left her parental abode, as if she was going to
some festivity, without turning round toward all that
she had left behind her in the way of affection and
recollection, and without even a farewell tear, which
the first kiss effaces, on her long turned-up lashes.
She looked like a bird which had escaped from its
cage, and does not know where to settle, which beats
its wings in the intoxication of the light, and which
warbles incessantly. She repeated the same words,
as if she had been rather intoxicated, and her laugh
sounded like the cooing of a pigeon, and looking into
my eyes, with her eyes full of languor, and her arms
round my neck like a bracelet, and with her burning
cheek against mine, she suddenly exclaimed:
“I say, my darling, would you not give ten years
of your life to have already got to the end of the
journey?”
And that passionate question so disconcerted me, that
I did not know what to reply, and my brain reeled,
as if I had been at the edge of a precipice.
Did she already know what her mother had not told her?
Had she already learned what she ought to have been
ignorant of? And had that heart, which I used
to compare to the Vessel of Election, of which
the litanies of Our Lady speak, already been damaged?
Oh! white veils, that hide the blushes, the half-closed
eyes and the trembling lips of some Psyche,
oh! little hands which you raised in an attitude of
prayer toward the lighted and decorated altar, oh!
innocent and charming questions, which delighted me
to the depths of my being, and which seemed to me
to be an absolute promise of happiness, were you nothing
but a lie, and a wonderfully well acted piece of trickery?
But was I not wrong, and an idiot, to allow such thoughts
to take possession of me, and to poison my deep, absorbing
love, which was now my only law and my only object,
by odious and foolish suggestions? What an abject
and miserable nature I must have, for such a simple,
affectionate, natural question to disturb me so, when
I ought immediately to have replied to Elaine’s
question, with all my heart that belonged to hear:
“Yes, ten or twenty years, because you are my
happiness, my desire, my love!”
