I have not written for nearly ten days. The veil was rent a week ago.
I always suspected the sea would help us to an understanding. Women
like Laura never forget the fitting background. If they do charitable
deeds because it enhances their beauty, the more they want beauty when
they fall. Joined to this is their passion for anything out of the
common, which does not spring from the poetical faculties of their
mind, but from a desire to adorn themselves. I have not so lost my
head as not to be able to judge Laura, though really I do not know
whether she has not the right to be what she is, and to think the sun
and stars are made on purpose for her adornment. Absolute beauty,
in the nature of things, must be essentially egotistic, and subject
everything to its rule. Laura is the very incarnation of beauty, and
nobody has the right to ask anything else from her than to be always
and everywhere beautiful; at least, I do not ask for more.
Thanks to my skill in seamanship, we can be alone on our excursions.
A week ago, on a sultry day, Laura expressed a wish to go out in the
boat. Like a Hecate, she exults in heat. A gentle breeze drove us a
long distance from the shore, and then the wind fell. The lateen sail
hung motionless from the mast. The rays of the sun, reflected from the
glassy surface of the water, increased the heat, although it was late
in the afternoon. Laura threw herself on the Indian matting, and
resting her head against the cushions, remained motionless, all in
a red glow, from the sun filtering through the awning. A strange
laziness had taken possession of me, and at the same time the sight
of this woman with her Greek form that showed through the clinging
drapery sent a thrill of admiration through my veins. Her eyes were
veiled, the lips slightly parted; her whole presence expressed
powerlessness, and seemed to say, "I am weak."
We came back late to the villa, and the return will remain for a long
time in my memory. After a sunset in which sky and earth seemed to be
wedded in a splendor without limit and without division, there came a
night of such beauty as I had never seen on the Riviera. From the vast
deep rose the immense red orb of the moon, which filled the air with a
mellow light, and at the same time made a broad, luminous path on the
sea, on which we glided towards the shore. There was a gentle swell on
the water, like a heaving sigh. From the little harbor the voices
of the Ligurian fishermen, singing a chorus, came up to us. A light
breeze from the shore wafted towards us the scent of orange-blossoms.
Although not prone to let myself be carried away by my sensations, I
was under the spell of this unutterable sweetness that floated over
land and sea, and clung like dew to soul and body.
From time to time my eyes rested upon the Helen-like woman whose white
draperies glistened in the moonlight, and I fancied myself living in
ancient Greece, and that we were floating somewhere, maybe towards the
sacred olive groves where the Eleusinian mysteries were enacted. Our
rapture did not seem any more a rapture of the senses, but a cult, a
mystic alliance with that night, that spring, and all nature.