impulse to interfere in the matter—it would be nothing more than: ‘For goodness’ sake strike, my good man, the woman is waiting for it!’ And if afterwards you again see the picture, and see it again often, then your first impression will even have become this: ‘Isn’t this business finished yet? Is he still standing and is she still lying there?’ ”
“But then what movement is there in the beauty of the women at Arles?” asked Verbrugge.
“Oh, that is quite a different thing! They enact a whole period of history in their features. Carthage flourishes and builds ships on their brow . . . hear Hannibal’s oath against Rome . . . see, they are twining strings for their bows . . . see, the town is on fire.”
“Max, Max, I really believe you lost your heart at Arles,” teased Tine.
“Yes, for a moment . . . but I found it again: you shall hear. Just imagine . . . I do not say, I have there seen a woman whose beauty was this or the other, no: they were all beautiful, and so it was an impossibility there to fall in love pour tout de bon, because every next one again supplanted the previous one in your admiration, and I really thought at the time of Caligula or Tiberius—who is it again they tell this fable about?—who wished that the whole human race had only one head. For it was in this way the wish came to me that the women of Arles . . .”
“Might have but one head?”
“Yes . . .”
“In order to cut it off?”
“Of course not! In order to . . . kiss it on the brow, I was going to say, but yet that’s not it! No, to gaze at it, to dream of it, and . . . to be good!”
Duclari and Verbrugge probably again thought this conclusion very peculiar. But Max did not notice their surprise, and continued:
“For so noble were the features, that one felt something like shame to be only a human being, and not a spark . . . a beam—
