onelle. She
had caught me, just as a birdcatcher on a frosty morning catches an
imprudent wren on a limed twig--in fact, she might have done whatever
she liked with me.

"I was under the charm of her enigmatical and mocking smile, that smile
in which her teeth gleamed cruelly between her red lips, and glistened
as if they were ready to bite and to heighten the pleasure of the most
delightful, the most voluptuous, kiss by pain.

"I loved everything in her--her feline suppleness, her languid looks
which emerged from her half-closed lids, full of promises and
temptation, her somewhat extreme elegance, and her hands, those long,
delicate white hands, with blue veins, like the bloodless hands of a
female saint in a stained glass window, and her slender fingers, on
which only the large blood-drop of a ruby glittered.

"I would have given her all my remaining youth and vigor to have laid
my burning hands upon the back of her cool, round neck, and to feel
that bright, silk, golden mane enveloping me and caressing my skin. I
was never tired of hearing her disdainful, petulant voice, those
vibrations which sounded as if they proceeded from clear glass, whose
music, at times, became hoarse, harsh, and fierce, like the loud,
sonorous calls of the Valkyries.

"Good heavens! to be her lover, to be her chattel, to belong to her, to
devote one's whole existence to her, to spend one's last half-penny and
to sink in misery, only to have the glory and the happiness of
possessing her splendid beauty, the sweetness of her kisses, the pink
and the white of her demonlike soul all to myself, if only for a few
months!

"It makes you laugh, I know, to think that I should have been caught
like that--I who give such good, prudent advice to my friends--I who
fear love as I do those quicksands and shoals which appear at low tide
and in which one may be swallowed up and disappear!

"But who can answer for himself, who can defend himself against such a
danger, as the magnetic attraction that inheres in such a woman?
Nevertheless, I got cured and perfectly cured, and that quite
accidentally. This is how the enchantment, which was apparently so
infrangible, was broken.

"On the first night of a play, I was sitting in the stalls close to
Lucy, whose mother had accompanied her, as usual. They occupied the
front of a box, side by side. From some unsurmountable attraction, I
never ceased looking at the woman whom I loved with all the force of my
b