Julie's tears would sometimes suddenly flow from a strange sadness. She
knew me condemned, by this concealed though to us ever-present death,
to behold in her but a phantom of happiness, which would vanish ere I
could press it to my heart. She grieved and accused herself for having
inspired me with a passion which could never bring me joy. "Oh, that I
could die, die soon, die young, and still beloved!" would she say.
"Yes, die, as I can be to you but the bitter delusion of love and joy;
at once your rapture and your woe. Ah, the divinest joys and the most
cruel anguish are mingled in my destiny! Oh, that love would kill me;
and that you might survive to love after me, as your nature and your
heart should love! In dying, I shall be less wretched than I am while
feeling that I live by your sacrifices, and doom your youth and your
love to a perpetual death!"
"Oh, blaspheme not against such ineffable joy!" I exclaimed, placing my
trembling hands beneath her eyes to receive her fast dropping tears.
"What base idea have you conceived of him whom God has thought worthy
to meet, to understand, and to love you? Are there not more oceans of
tenderness and love in this tear which falls warm from your heart, and
which I carry to my lips as the life's blood of our tortured love, than
in the thousand sated desires and guilty pleasures in which are
engulfed such vile attachments as you regret for me? Have I ever seemed
to you to desire aught else than this twofold suffering? Does it not
make of us both voluntary and pure victims? Is it not an eternal
holocaust of love, such as, from Heloise to us, the angels can scarce
have witnessed? Have I ever once reproached the Almighty, even in the
madness of my solitary nights, for having raised me by you, and for
you, above the condition of man? He has given me in you, not a woman to
be polluted by the embrace of these mortal arms, but an impalpable and
sacred incarnation of immaterial beauty. Does not the celestial fire,
which night and day burns so rapturously within me, consume all dross
of vulgar desire? Am I aught but flame? A flame as pure and holy as the
rays of your soul which first kindled it, and now feed it unceasingly
through your beaming eye! Ah, Julie, estimate yourself more worthily,
and weep not over sorrows which you imagine you inflict on me! I do not
suffer. My life is one perpetual overflow of happiness, filled by you
alone,--a repose of sense, a sleep of which you are the dream. You have
transformed my nature. I suffer? Oh, would that I could sometimes
suffer, that I might have somewhat to offer unto God, were it but the
consciousness of a privation, the bitterness of a tear, in return for
all he has given me in you! To suffer for you, might, perchance, be the
only thing which could add one drop to that cup of happiness which it
is given me to quaff. To suffer thus, is it to suffer, or to enjoy? No;
thus to live, is, in truth, to die, but it is to die some years earlier
to this wretched life, to live beforehand of the life of heaven."