he took the thing seriously. I saw him
enter one evening with an expression of gravity on his face; he spoke of
my mistress and continued in his tone of persiflage, saying all manner
of evil of women. While he was speaking I was leaning on my elbow, and,
rising in my bed, I listened attentively.

It was one of those sombre evenings when the sighing of the wind recalls
the moaning of a dying man. A fitful storm was brewing, and between
the plashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All
nature suffers in such moments, the trees writhe in pain and hide their
heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of
cities are deserted. I was suffering from my wound. But a short time
before I had a mistress and a friend. The mistress had deceived me
and the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly
distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was
under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to
find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a
dream, ridiculous and puerile, the falseness of which had just been
disclosed. Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm
and serious, although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of
heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him
bald before his time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a
cuirass; he was a materialist and he waited for death.

"Octave," he said, "after what has happened to you, I see that you
believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a
word, you believe in what is said here below and not in what is done.
That is because you do not reason soundly, and it may lead you into
great misfortune.

"Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create
melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization,
they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life,
the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of
nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful
girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these
diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a
single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a
musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had
for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the si