Then, quickly, carried away by some impulse, she walked toward him with her hands outstretched; and when he had taken, pressed, and held these two hands, she said, in a trembling, weak little voice, which was new to her husband: 

“Ah! my dear friend—­how happy I am!”

And Bondel, who was watching them, felt an icy chill run over him, as if he had been dipped in a cold bath.

FOUND ON A DROWNED MAN

Madame, you ask me whether I am laughing at you?  You cannot believe that a man has never been in love.  Well, then, no, no, I have never loved, never!

Why is this?  I really cannot tell.  I have never experienced that intoxication of the heart which we call love!  Never have I lived in that dream, in that exaltation, in that state of madness into which the image of a woman casts us.  I have never been pursued, haunted, roused to fever heat, lifted up to Paradise by the thought of meeting, or by the possession of, a being who had suddenly become for me more desirable than any good fortune, more beautiful than any other creature, of more consequence than the whole world!  I have never wept, I have never suffered on account of any of you.  I have not passed my nights sleepless, while thinking of her.  I have no experience of waking thoughts bright with thought and memories of her.  I have never known the wild rapture of hope before her arrival, or the divine sadness of regret when she went from me, leaving behind her a delicate odor of violet powder.

I have never been in love.

I have also often asked myself why this is.  And truly I can scarcely tell.  Nevertheless I have found some reasons for it; but they are of a metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not be able to appreciate them.

I suppose I am too critical of women to submit to their fascination.  I ask you to forgive me for this remark.  I will explain what I mean.  In every creature there is a moral being and a physical being.  In order to love, it would be necessary for me to find a harmony between these two beings which I have never found.  One always predominates; sometimes the moral, sometimes the physical.

The intellect which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to love her, is not the same as the virile intellect.  It is more, and it is less.  A woman must be frank, delicate, sensitive, refined, impressionable.  She has no need of either power or initiative in thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry and that faculty of assimilation which, in a little while, raises her to an equality with him who shares her life.  Her greatest quality must be tact, that subtle sense which is to the mind what touch is to the body.  It reveals to her a thousand little things, contours, angles and forms on the plane of the intellectual.