beauty of the beloved object, renounce all
judgment, all reflection, all perspicacity.

I am incapable of such blindness, and rebel against a seductiveness
not founded on reason. This is not all. I have such a high and subtle
idea of harmony, that nothing can ever realize my ideal. But you will
call me a madman. Listen to me. A woman, in my opinion, may have an
exquisite soul and a charming body, without that body and that soul
being in perfect accord with one another. I mean that persons who have
noses made in a certain shape are not to be expected to think in a
certain fashion. The fat have no right to make use of the same words
and phrases as the thin. You, who have blue eyes, madame, cannot look
at life, and judge of things and events as if you had black eyes. The
shades of your eyes should correspond, by a sort of fatality, with the
shades of your thought. In perceiving these things I have the scent of
a bloodhound. Laugh if you like, but it is so.

And yet I imagined that I was in love for an hour, for a day. I had
foolishly yielded to the influence of surrounding circumstances. I
allowed myself to be beguiled by the mirage of an aurora. Would you
like me to relate for you this short history?

* * * * *

I met, one evening, a pretty enthusiastic woman who wanted, for the
purpose of humoring a poetic fancy, to spend a night with me in a boat
on a river. I would have preferred a room and a bed; however, I
consented to take instead the river and the boat.

It was in the month of June. My fair companion chose a moonlight night
in order to excite her imagination all the better.

We had dined at a riverside inn, and then we set out in the boat about
ten o'clock. I thought it a rather foolish kind of adventure; but as
my companion pleased me I did not bother myself too much about this. I
sat down on the seat facing her; I seized the oars, and off we
started.

I could not deny that the scene was picturesque. We glided past a
wooded isle full of nightingales, and the current carried us rapidly
over the river covered with silvery ripples. The toads uttered their
shrill, monotonous cry; the frogs croaked in the grass by the river's
bank, and the lapping of the water as it flowed on made around us a
kind of confused murmur almost imperceptible, disquieting, and gave us
a vague sensation of mysterious fear.

The sweet charm of warm nights and of streams glittering in the
moonlight penet