whom everyone tried to please; that pretty creature, so fragile, like herself, the little old woman, and, like her also, without teeth and without hair.
And she approached the child, wishing to smile at it and make faces pleasantly.
But the terrified child struggled against the caresses of the good, decrepit woman, and filled the house with its yelping.
Then the kind old woman retired into her eternal solitude, and cried in a corner, saying to herself : ‘Oh! for us wretched old females, the age when we could please, if only the innocent, is past; and we fill with horror the little children whom we wish to love!’
II
CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST
Oh, the vast delight of gazing fixedly, drowning one’s glance in the immensity of sky and sea! Solitude, silence, incomparable chastity of the azure! A little sailing-boat shuddering on the horizon, the paradigm, in its littleness and its isolation, of my irretrievable existence; monotonous melody of the surge; all these things reflect my thoughts, or I reflect theirs (for in the grandeur of reverie the ego is soon lost); they think, as I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbling, without syllogism, without deduction.
Nevertheless, these thoughts, whether formed within me or projected from things, soon grow too intense. The energy which pleasure does not absorb creates a kind of unrest and a positive pain. My nerves, now excessively tense, transmit only wailing and sorrowful vibrations.
And now the profundity of the sky perplexes me; the limpid light exasperates me. The insensitiveness of the sea, the immobility of the scene, revolt me. Oh, must we suffer eternally, or flee eternally from all that is beautiful? Nature, unpitying enchantress, ever-victorious rival, let me be! Leave off tempting my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.
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