"I loved her, not with a sensual love and not with mere tenderness
of heart and soul, but with an absolute, complete love, with an
overpowering passion.

"Hear me:

"When I met her for the first time I felt a strange sensation. It was
not astonishment nor admiration, nor yet that which is called love at
first sight, but a feeling of delicious well-being, as if I had been
plunged into a warm bath. Her gestures seduced me, her voice enchanted
me, and it was with infinite pleasure that I looked upon her person.
It seemed to me as if I had seen her before and as if I had known her a
long time. She had within her something of my spirit.

"She seemed to me like an answer to a cry uttered by my soul, to that
vague and unceasing cry with which we call upon Hope during our whole
life.

"When I knew her a little better, the mere thought of seeing her again
filled me with exquisite and profound uneasiness; the touch of her hand
in mine was more delightful to me than anything that I had imagined;
her smile filled me with a mad joy, with the desire to run, to dance, to
fling myself upon the ground.

"So we became lovers.

"Yes, more than that: she was my very life. I looked for nothing further
on earth, and had no further desires. I longed for nothing further.

"One evening, when we had gone on a somewhat long walk by the river,
we were overtaken by the rain, and she caught cold. It developed into
pneumonia the next day, and a week later she was dead.

"During the hours of her suffering astonishment and consternation
prevented my understanding and reflecting upon it, but when she was dead
I was so overwhelmed by blank despair that I had no thoughts left. I
wept.

"During all the horrible details of the interment my keen and wild grief
was like a madness, a kind of sensual, physical grief.

"Then when she was gone, when she was under the earth, my mind at once
found itself again, and I passed through a series of moral sufferings
so terrible that even the love she had vouchsafed to me was dear at that
price.

"Then the fixed idea came to me: I shall not see her again.

"When one dwells on this thought for a whole day one feels as if he were
going mad. Just think of it! There is a woman whom you adore, a unique
woman, for in the whole universe there is not a second one like her.
This woman has given herself to you and has created with you the
mysterious union that is called Love. Her eye seems to you more vast
than