e end?" said he. "Oh! Christiane, if you were only more gentle,
if your grief had not made you insensible to the pain of others, you
would spare me further words. Have I not already told you, that from
the first moment I saw you I recognized the inevitable destiny that
bound me to you, and have vainly striven with all the powers of the
soul and mind to escape the thraldom? I have concealed from myself
nothing that could help to stifle such a flame--your obstinacy, your
atheism, your indifference to all that usually charms and misleads your
sex. I have told myself that I had no happiness to expect from this
love, no future, no help for my own needs; the thirst for rule which
you falsely impute to me--or no, let me confess it, which perhaps
usually sways me--was never so ignominiously baffled as by you.
Everything that can offend the vanity, the pride, even the honor of a
man, or repel his affection, I have experienced at your hands. And now,
Christiane, I ask you on your conscience: do you doubt the power of
nature, or as I call it, the mystical force, which alone is capable, in
spite of everything, of bringing me back to your feet? I was fully
prepared to be misunderstood, reproached, abused. But that is the very
miracle of love: it prefers to be trampled under foot by the beloved
object, rather than caressed by an indifferent hand. Now have you still
the heart to call me a fiend, only anxious to get your soul into his
power? Your soul? oh God! I have given up the hope of winning it, spite
of the pain it has cost me, I despair of initiating you into the depths
of my life with God, making you a sharer in the bliss of my fears and
longings. But believe me, Christiane, there is an earthly compensation
for the highest divine ecstacies, of which all minds are not capable, a
compensation which matures the soul and at the same time prepares it
for higher degrees of knowledge: the blending of spiritual and sensual
passion, that thrills me with ardent yearning if I only touch your
hand, meet your eyes, feel your breath on my face. No one, no matter
how much he may have suffered, issues from this bath of the soul
unrejuvenated and unrefreshed, and indeed, my friend, for your own sake
I wish you had the courage to rush with closed eyes into the flames
from which the poor mortal creature, purged from all the dross of
earthly sorrow, emerges purified as a new, divinely consoled being.

"This is the mystery," he continued as she was s