id to himself, "Yes, I was right in declaring that the
only women you can continue to love are those you lose.

"To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and
married, dead, perhaps, or out of France--to learn that she loved you,
though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that's
the dream! These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of
melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count. Because
there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.

"To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream
chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen
brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away
from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble
and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination
is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and
pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life."

CHAPTER XIV

From this scene he had learned an alarming lesson: that the flesh
domineers the soul and refuses to admit any schism. The flesh decisively
does not intend that one shall get along without it and indulge in
out-of-the-world pleasures which it can partake only on condition that
it keep quiet. For the first time, reviewing these turpitudes, he really
understood the meaning of that now obsolete word _chastity_, and he
savoured it in all its pristine freshness. Just as a man who has drunk
too deeply the night before thinks, the morning after, of drinking
nothing but mineral water in future, so he dreamed, today, of pure
affection far from a bed.

He was still ruminating these thoughts when Des Hermies entered.

They spoke of amorous misadventures. Astonished at once by Durtal's
languor and the ascetic tone of his remarks, Des Hermies exclaimed, "Ah,
we had a gay old time last night?"

With the most decisive bad grace Durtal shook his head.

"Then," replied Des Hermies, "you are superior and inhuman. To love
without hope, immaculately, would be perfect if it did not induct such
brainstorms. There is no excuse for chastity, unless one has a pious end
in view, or unless the senses are failing, and if they are one had best
see a doctor, who will solve the question more or less unsatisfactorily.
To tell the truth, everything on earth culminates in the act you
reprove. The heart, which is supposed to be the noble part of man, has