thou,
green Venus? I have always cherished solitude. What long days I have passed
alone with my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being, and my cat is
a mystical companion--a spirit. I can, therefore, say that I have passed
whole days alone with my cat, and, alone with one of the last authors of
the Latin decadence; for since that white creature is no more, strangely
and singularly I have loved all that the word _fall_ expresses. In
such wise that my favourite season of the year is the last weary days of
summer, which immediately precede autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in
is when the sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper on
the grey walls and red copper on the tiles. In the same way the literature
that my soul demands--a sad voluptuousness--is the dying poetry of the last
moments of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating
approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of
the first Christian poetry.

"I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems (whose paint has more
charm for me than the blush of youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of
the pure animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melancholy beneath
my window. It played in the great alley of poplars, whose leaves appear to
me yellow, even in the spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall
candles for the last time. The instrument is the saddest, yes, truly; the
piano scintillates, the violin opens the torn soul to the light, but the
barrel-organ, in the twilight of remembrance, made me dream despairingly.
Now it murmurs an air joyously vulgar which awakens joy in the heart of the
suburbs, an air old-fashioned and commonplace. Why do its flourishes go to
my soul, and make me weep like a romantic ballad? I listen, imbibing it
slowly, and I do not throw a penny out of the window for fear of moving
from my place, and seeing that the instrument is not singing itself.

II

"The old Saxony clock, which is slow, and which strikes thirteen amid its
flowers and gods, to whom did it belong? Thinkest that it came from Saxony
by the mail coaches of old time?

"(Singular shadows hang about the worn-out panes.)

"And thy Venetian mirror, deep as a cold fountain in its banks of gilt
work; what is reflected there? Ah! I am sure that more than one woman
bathed there in her beauty's sin; and, perhaps, if I looked long enough, I
should see a naked phantom.

"Wicked one, thou of