ness, I am ready to throw myself in front of the firespitting muzzles of a hundred cannons. I feel myself strong enough to crush whole formidable armies single handed. When I walk on the street I look for runaway horses, fires or any other dangerous adventure where I can sacrifice my life. There is not a perilous or superhuman deed that I have not the courage to perform. But, that! I can not do!
"At first I offered myself the most ridiculous excuses, I gave myself the most illogical reasons for not leaving her. I said to myself that if I left her, Juliette would sink to even lower depths; that my love for her had in some manner been her last vestige of decency which I should finally succeed in restoring by saving her from the mire in which she wallowed. Truly I had been repaid by the luxury of pity and self sacrifice. But I was lying! I simply can't leave her! I can't because I love her, because the more depraved she is the more I love her. Because I want her, do you hear, Lirat? And if you only knew what it means to me, this love, what frenzies, what shame, what tortures? If you only knew to what depths of Hell passion can sink, you would be horrified! At night when she is asleep, I prowl about in her dressing room, opening drawers, digging among the cinders of the fire place, putting together pieces of torn letters, smelling the linens which she has just removed, devoting myself to the vilest spying, to the most shameful searching! It was not enough for me to know; I had to see as well! I have no longer a mind, a heart, or anything. I am just the embodiment of disordered, raving, famished sex, which demands its share of living flesh, like the fallow-deer that howl in their frenzy on rutting nights."'
I was exhausted. . . the words came out of my throat with a hissing sound. . . still I continued.
"Ah! It is beyond all comprehension! Sometimes it
