tell her that she must continue to
love?

"Ah! then I shall be no more! You will listen to him, faithless one! You
will blush as does the budding rose, and the blood of youth will mount to
your face. While saying that your heart is sealed, you will allow it to
escape through that fresh aureole of beauty, each ray of which allures a
kiss. How much they desire to be loved who say they love no more! And why
should that astonish you? You are a woman; that body, that spotless
bosom, you know what they are worth; when you conceal them under your
dress you do not believe, as do the virgins, that all are alike, and you
know the price of your modesty. How can a woman who has been praised
resolve to be praised no more? Does she think she is living when she
remains in the shadow and there is silence round about her beauty? Her
beauty itself is the admiring glance of her lover. No, no, there can be
no doubt of it; she who has loved, can not live without love; she who has
seen death clings to life. Brigitte loves me and will perhaps die of
love; I will kill myself and another will have her.

"Another, another!" I repeated, bending over her until my head touched
her shoulder. "Is she not a widow? Has she not already seen death? Have
not these little hands prepared the dead for burial? Her tears for the
second will not flow as long as those shed for the first. Ah! God forgive
me! While she sleeps why should I not kill her? If I should awaken her
now and tell her that her hour had come, and that we were going to die
with a last kiss, she would consent. What does it matter? Is it certain
that all does not end with that?"

I found a knife on the table and I picked it up.

"Fear, cowardice, superstition! What do they know about it who talk of
something else beyond? It is for the ignorant common people that a future
life has been invented, but who really believes in it? What watcher in
the cemetery has seen Death leave his tomb and hold consultation with a
priest? In olden times there were phantoms; they are interdicted by the
police in civilized cities, and no cries are now heard issuing from the
earth except from those buried in haste. Who has silenced death, if it
has ever spoken? Because funeral processions are no longer permitted to
encumber our streets, does the celestial spirit languish?

"To die, that is the final purpose, the end. God has established it, man
discusses it; but over every door is written: 'Do what thou wilt, tho