God has nothing
better for man; that is why love is better than genius. But tell me, is
that the love of our women? No, no, it must be admitted. Love, for them,
is another thing; it is to go out veiled, to write in secret, to make
trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs under a starched and unnatural
robe, then to draw bolts and throw it aside, to humiliate a rival, to
deceive a husband, to render a lover desolate; to love, for our women, is
to play at lying, as children play at hide and seek, the hideous
debauchee of a heart, worse than all the lubricity of the Romans, or the
Saturnalia of Priapus; bastard parody of vice itself as well as of
virtue; loathsome comedy where all is whispering and oblique glances,
where all is small, elegant and deformed like the porcelain monsters
brought from China; lamentable derision of all that is beautiful and
ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body, a skeleton of all
that God has made."
Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall.
CHAPTER VI
THE next morning I rode through the Bois de Boulogne; the day was dark
and threatening. At the Porte Maillot I dropped the reins on the back of
my horse and abandoned myself to reverie, revolving in my mind the words
spoken by Desgenais the evening before.
Suddenly I heard my name called. Turning my head I spied one of my
mistress's most intimate friends in an open carriage.
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