I think I have already written in my notes that love is very like
torture or a surgical operation. But that idea can be developed in the
bitterest way. Even though two lovers are deeply smitten and filled
with reciprocal desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or
less enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or the
hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do you hear those sighs,
preludes of a tragedy of shame, those groanings, those cries, those
throat-rattlings? Who has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly
summoned them forth? And what worse do you find in the torments applied
by painstaking torturers? Those faraway eyes of the somnambulist, those
limbs the muscles of which twitch and grow taut as under the action
of a galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their most
infuriate consequences, surely yield no such frightful, no such curious
examples. And the human countenance, which Ovid thought fashioned to
reflect the stars, behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is
spread in a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be
sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of decomposition.
Frightful play, in which one of the players must lose control of
himself!
Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the greatest pleasure
of love. Some one answered naturally: in receiving, and another: in
giving one's self. The former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter:
delight of humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation of
Christ.--Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward to affirm that the
greatest pleasure of love is to create citizens for the fatherland.
As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of love rests in the
certainty of doing _evil_. Both man and woman know, from birth, that in
evil lies all bliss.
V
When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends have a secret
desire to see him die; some, to establish the fact that his health is
inferior to theirs; others, in the disinterested hope of studying an
agony.
The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs..