uet, the perfume of which
intoxicated me. She yielded to my encircling arms as would an Indian
vine, with a gentleness so sweet and so sympathetic that I seemed
enveloped with a perfumed veil of silk. At each turn there could be
heard a light tinkling from her metal girdle; she moved so gracefully
that I thought I beheld a beautiful star, and her smile was that of a
fairy about to vanish from human sight. The tender and voluptuous music
of the dance seemed to come from her lips, while her head, covered with
a wilderness of black tresses, bent backward as if her neck was too
slender to support its weight.

When the waltz was over I threw myself on a chair; my heart beat wildly:
"Oh, heaven!" I murmured, "how can it be possible? Oh, superb monster!
Oh! beautiful reptile! How you writhe, how you coil in and out, sweet
adder, with supple and spotted skin! Thy cousin the serpent has taught
thee to coil about the tree of life holding between thy lips the apple
of temptation. Oh! Melusina! Melusina! The hearts of men are thine. You
know it well, enchantress, with your soft languor that seems to suspect
nothing! You know very well that you ruin, that you destroy; you know
that he who touches you will suffer; you know that he dies who basks in
your smile, who breathes the perfume of your flowers and comes under
the magic influence of your charms; that is why you abandon yourself so
freely, that is why your smile is so sweet, your flowers so fresh; that
is why you place your arms so gently on our shoulders. Oh, heaven! what
is your will with us?"

Professor Halle has said a terrible thing: "Woman is the nervous part of
humanity, man the muscular." Humboldt himself, that serious thinker, has
said that an invisible atmosphere surrounds the human nerves.

I do not quote the dreamers who watch the wheeling flight of
Spallanzani's bat, and who think they have found a sixth sense in
nature. Such as nature is, her mysteries are terrible enough, her powers
mighty enough--that nature which creates us, mocks at us, and kills
us--without our seeking to deepen the shadows that surround us. But
where is the man who thinks he has lived that will deny woman's power
over us? Has he ever taken leave of a beautiful dancer with trembling
hands? Has he ever felt that indefinable enervating magnetism which, in
the midst of the dance, under the influence of music, and the warmth,
making all else seem cold, that comes from a young woman, electrifying