re burning in the secret
depths of his being, in what, for lack of a better word, we call the
heart. He did not applaud, he said nothing; he felt a mad impulse, a
sort of frenzy of the sort that seizes us only at the age when there is
a something indefinably terrible and infernal in our desires. Sarrasine
longed to rush upon the stage and seize that woman. His strength,
increased a hundredfold by a moral depression impossible to
describe,--for such phenomena take place in a sphere inaccessible to
human observation,--insisted upon manifesting itself with deplorable
violence. Looking at him, you would have said that he was a cold, dull
man. Renown, science, future, life, prizes, all vanished.

"'To win her love or die!' Such was the sentence Sarrasine pronounced
upon himself.

"He was so completely intoxicated that he no longer saw theatre,
audience, or actors, no longer heard the music. Nay, more, there was no
space between him and La Zambinella; he possessed her; his eyes, fixed
steadfastly upon her, took possession of her. An almost diabolical power
enabled him to feel the breath of that voice, to inhale the fragrant
powder with which her hair was covered, to see the slightest
inequalities of her face, to count the blue veins which threaded their
way beneath the satiny skin. And that fresh, brisk voice of silvery
_timbre_, flexible as a thread to which the faintest breath of air gives
form, which it rolls and unrolls, tangles and blows away, that voice
attacked his heart so fiercely that he more than once uttered an
involuntary exclamation, extorted by the convulsive ecstasy too rarely
evoked by human passions. He was soon obliged to leave the theatre. His
trembling legs almost refused to bear him. He was prostrated, weak, like
a nervous man who has given way to a terrible burst of anger. He had had
such exquisite pleasure, or perhaps had suffered so, that his life had
flowed away like water from an overturned vessel. He felt a void
within him, a sense of goneness like the utter lack of strength which
discourages a convalescent just recovering from a serious sickness.
Overwhelmed by inexplicable melancholy, he sat down on the steps of a
church. There, with his back resting against a pillar, he lost himself
in a fit of meditation as confused as a dream. Passion had dealt him a
crushing blow. On his return to his apartments he was seized by one
of those paroxysms of activity which reveal to us the presence of new
princ