he temperature; one who would have been a
very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite
herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His
fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female
cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,
which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited
the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first
interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had
thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay
weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the
sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and
was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of
this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.
He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture,
commixed with sicklier delight.

People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,
emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its
convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all
blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in
slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the
blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant
unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute
in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the
ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing,
produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.
Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not
returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could
not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a
little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that
his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of
moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with
dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly
shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.

Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious
hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in
physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox,
the terrible plague of the country, had pit