way is rather
fatal. One gets to expect, and seldom misses, a close and dreary air
throughout, often aggravated by an actual final sentence or paragraph of
lamentation and mourning and woe. But I do not resent the "nervous
impression" left on me by _La Course a la Mort_, with its indefinitely
stated but certain end of suicide, and its unbroken soliloquy of dreary
dream. For it is in one key all through; it never falls out of tune or
time; and it does actually represent a true, an existent, though a
partial and morbid attitude of mind. It is also in parts very well
written, and the blending of life and dream is sometimes almost Poesque.
A novel, except by the extremest stretch of courtesy, it is not, being
simply a panorama of the moods of its scarcely heroic hero. And he does
not "set one's back up" like Rene, or, in my case at least, produce
boredom like most of the other "World-pain"-ers. The still more shadowy
appearances of the heroine Cecile, who dies before her lover, while the
course of his love is more dream than action, are well brought in and
attractive; and there is one passage descriptive of waltzing which would
atone for anything. Many people have tried to write about waltzing, but
few have done it well; this is almost adequate. I wonder if I dare
translate it?

We never thought that people might be turning an evil eye on
us; we cared nothing for the indignation of the mammas
sitting passive and motionless; we hardly felt the couples
that we jostled.[553] Thanks to the cradling of the rhythm,
to the intoxication of our rapid and regular movement, there
fell on us something like a great calm. Drunk with one
another, hurried by the absorbing voluptuousness of the
waltz, we went on and on vertiginously. People and things
turned with us, surrounding us with a gyre of moving
shadows, under a fantastic light formed of crossing
reflections, in an atmosphere where one breathed inebriating
perfumes, and where every atom vibrated to the ever more
bewildering sound of music. Time passed, and we still went
on; losing little by little all consciousness except that of
our own movement. Then it even seemed that we came out of
ourselves; we heard nothing but a single beat, marking the
cadence with strokes more and more muffled. The lights,
melting into one, bathed us in a dreamy glow; we felt not
the floor under our feet; we f