“So we became lovers.

“Yes, more than that:  she was my very life.  I looked for nothing further on earth, and had no further desires.  I longed for nothing further.

“One evening, when we had gone on a somewhat long walk by the river, we were overtaken by the rain, and she caught cold.  It developed into pneumonia the next day, and a week later she was dead.

“During the hours of her suffering astonishment and consternation prevented my understanding and reflecting upon it, but when she was dead I was so overwhelmed by blank despair that I had no thoughts left.  I wept.

“During all the horrible details of the interment my keen and wild grief was like a madness, a kind of sensual, physical grief.

“Then when she was gone, when she was under the earth, my mind at once found itself again, and I passed through a series of moral sufferings so terrible that even the love she had vouchsafed to me was dear at that price.

“Then the fixed idea came to me:  I shall not see her again.

“When one dwells on this thought for a whole day one feels as if he were going mad.  Just think of it!  There is a woman whom you adore, a unique woman, for in the whole universe there is not a second one like her.  This woman has given herself to you and has created with you the mysterious union that is called Love.  Her eye seems to you more vast than space, more charming than the world, that clear eye smiling with her tenderness.  This woman loves you.  When she speaks to you her voice floods you with joy.

“And suddenly she disappears!  Think of it!  She disappears, not only for you, but forever.  She is dead.  Do you understand what that means?  Never, never, never, not anywhere will she exist any more.  Nevermore will that eye look upon anything again; nevermore will that voice, nor any voice like it, utter a word in the same way as she uttered it.

“Nevermore will a face be born that is like hers.  Never, never!  The molds of statues are kept; casts are kept by which one can make objects with the same outlines and forms.  But that one body and that one face will never more be born again upon the earth.  And yet millions and millions of creatures will be born, and more than that, and this one woman will not reappear among all the women of the future.  Is it possible?  It drives one mad to think of it.

“She lived for twenty-years, not more, and she has disappeared forever, forever, forever!  She thought, she smiled, she loved me.  And now nothing!  The flies that die in the autumn are as much as we are in this world.  And now nothing!  And I thought that her body, her fresh body, so warm, so sweet, so white, so lovely, would rot down there in that box under the earth.  And her soul, her thought, her love—­where is it?

“Not to see her again!  The idea of this decomposing body, that I might yet recognize, haunted me.  I wanted to look at it once more.