y
great masterpieces of analysis about to live a new book before writing it?
I had no time to answer this question, for, with a glance at an onyx vase
containing some cigarettes of Turkish tobacco, he offered me one, lighted
one himself and began first to question, then to reply to me. I listened
while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten my Machiavellian
combination, so keen was my relish of the joyous intimacy of this
communion with a mind I had passionately loved in his works. He was the
first of the great writers of our day whom I had thus approached on
something like terms of intimacy. As we talked I observed the strange
similarity between his spoken and his written words. I admired the
charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of
imagination, his superabundant intelligence, the liveliness of his
impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.

"There is no such thing as an age for love," he said in substance,
"because the man capable of loving--in the complex and modern sense of
love as a sort of ideal exaltation--never ceases to love. I will go
further; he never ceases to love the same person. You know the experiment
that a contemporary physiologist tried with a series of portraits to
determine in what the indefinable resemblances called family likeness
consisted? He took photographs of twenty persons of the same blood, then
he photographed these photographs on the same plate, one over the other.
In this way he discovered the common features which determined the type.
Well, I am convinced that if we could try a similar experiment and
photograph one upon another the pictures of the different women whom the
same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life we
should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most
inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or
even twenty different embodiments. The main point is to find out at what
age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image
they have constantly borne within themselves. For them that would be the
age for love.

"The age for being loved?" he continued. "The deepest of all the passions
I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my masters, a
poet, and he was sixty years old at the time. It is true that he still
held himself as erect as a young man, he came and went with a step as
light as yours, he conversed like Riva