lash at the sight of them; my blood rushes
through my veins, my soul is elated, and my hands tremble from desire as
soon as I touch them. I pass on. There are three closed doors at the
bottom of that gallery. I can make my choice of them. I have three
harems.

But I enter most often the habitation of the orchids, my little
wheedlers, by preference. Their chamber is low, suffocating. The humid
and hot air make the skin moist, takes away the breath and causes the
fingers to quiver. They come, these strange girls, from a country marshy,
burning and unhealthy. They draw you towards them as do the sirens, are
as deadly as poison, admirably fantastic, enervating, dreadful. The
butterflies here would also seem to have enormous wings, tiny feet, and
eyes! Yes! they have also eyes! They look at me, they see me, prodigious,
incomparable beings, fairies, daughters of the sacred earth, of the
impalpable air, and of hot sun rays, that mother bountiful of the
universe. Yes, they have wings, they have eyes, and nuances that no
painter could imitate, every charm, every grace, every form that one
could dream of. These wombs are transverse, odoriferous and transparent,
ever open for love and more tempting than all the flesh of women. The
unimaginable designs of their little bodies inebriates the soul, and
transports it to a paradise of images and of voluptuous ideals. They
tremble upon their stems as though they would fly. When they do fly do
they come to me? No, it is my heart that hovers o'er them, like a mystic
male, tortured by love.

No wing of any animal can keep pace with them. We are alone, they and I,
in the lighted prison which I have constructed for them. I regard them, I
contemplate them, I admire them, I adore them, the one after the other.

How healthy, strong and rosy, a rosiness that moistens the lips of
desire! How I love them! The border is frizzled, paler than their throat,
where the carolla hides itself away; a mysterious mouth, seductive sugar
under the tongue, exhibiting and unveiling the delicate, admirable and
sacred organs of these divine little creatures which smell so exquisitely
and do not speak.

I sometimes have a passion for some of them that lasts as long as their
existence, which only embraces a few days and nights. I then have them
taken away from the common gallery and enclosed in a pretty glass cabin,
in which there murmurs a jet of water over against a tropical gazon,
which has been brought from o