And perhaps some evening next spring, moved by a beam
of moonlight falling through the branches on the grass
at their feet, they will join and press their hands
in memory of all this cruel and suppressed suffering;
and, perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in
their veins a little of this thrill which they would
not have known without it, and will give to those
two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid
and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this
madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an
instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime!
THE THIEF
While apparently thinking of something else, Dr. Sorbier
had been listening quietly to those amazing accounts
of burglaries and daring deeds that might have been
taken from the trial of Cartouche. “Assuredly,”
he exclaimed, “assuredly, I know of no viler
fault nor any meaner action than to attack a girl’s
innocence, to corrupt her, to profit by a moment of
unconscious weakness and of madness, when her heart
is beating like that of a frightened fawn, and her
pure lips seek those of her tempter; when she abandons
herself without thinking of the irremediable stain,
nor of her fall, nor of the morrow.
“The man who has brought this about slowly,
viciously, who can tell with what science of evil,
and who, in such a case, has not steadiness and self-restraint
enough to quench that flame by some icy words, who
has not sense enough for two, who cannot recover his
self-possession and master the runaway brute within
him, and who loses his head on the edge of the precipice
over which she is going to fall, is as contemptible
as any man who breaks open a lock, or as any rascal
on the lookout for a house left defenceless and unprotected
or for some easy and dishonest stroke of business,
or as that thief whose various exploits you have just
related to us.
“I, for my part, utterly refuse to absolve him,
even when extenuating circumstances plead in his favor,
even when he is carrying on a dangerous flirtation,
in which a man tries in vain to keep his balance, not
to exceed the limits of the game, any more than at
lawn tennis; even when the parts are inverted and
a man’s adversary is some precocious, curious,
seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she
has nothing to learn and nothing to experience, except
the last chapter of love, one of those girls from
whom may fate always preserve our sons, and whom a
psychological novel writer has christened ‘The
Semi-Virgins.’
“It is, of course, difficult and painful for
that coarse and unfathomable vanity which is characteristic
of every man, and which might be called ‘malism’,
not to stir such a charming fire, difficult to act
the Joseph and the fool, to turn away his eyes, and,
as it were, to put wax into his ears, like the companions
of Ulysses when they were attracted by the divine,
seductive songs of the Sirens, difficult only to touch
