times at the thought that
another life was so close to mine! that I was the servant, the
guardian, the friend, the indispensable fellow-traveller of a
creature, young, beautiful, wealthy, but weak, lonely, and insulted!
It is pleasant even to be ill when you know that there are people
who are looking forward to your convalescence as to a holiday. One
day I heard her whispering behind the door with my doctor, and then
she came in to me with tear-stained eyes. It was a bad sign, but I
was touched, and there was a wonderful lightness in my heart.

But at last they allowed me to go out on the balcony. The sunshine
and the breeze from the sea caressed and fondled my sick body. I
looked down at the familiar gondolas, which glide with feminine
grace smoothly and majestically as though they were alive, and felt
all the luxury of this original, fascinating civilisation. There
was a smell of the sea. Some one was playing a stringed instrument
and two voices were singing. How delightful it was! How unlike it
was to that Petersburg night when the wet snow was falling and
beating so rudely on our faces. If one looks straight across the
canal, one sees the sea, and on the wide expanse towards the horizon
the sun glittered on the water so dazzlingly that it hurt one's
eyes to look at it. My soul yearned towards that lovely sea, which
was so akin to me and to which I had given up my youth. I longed
to live--to live--and nothing more.

A fortnight later I began walking freely. I loved to sit in the
sun, and to listen to the gondoliers without understanding them,
and for hours together to gaze at the little house where, they said,
Desdemona lived--a naive, mournful little house with a demure
expression, as light as lace, so light that it looked as though one
could lift it from its place with one hand. I stood for a long time
by the tomb of Canova, and could not take my eyes off the melancholy
lion. And in the Palace of the Doges I was always drawn to the
corner where the portrait of the unhappy Marino Faliero was painted
over with black. "It is fine to be an artist, a poet, a dramatist,"
I thought, "but since that is not vouchsafed to me, if only I could
go in for mysticism! If only I had a grain of some faith to add to
the unruffled peace and serenity that fills the soul!"

In the evening we ate oysters, drank wine, and went out in a gondola.
I remember our black gondola swayed softly in the same place while
the water faintly gurgle