The Best Works of Balzac. Оноре де Бальзак
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Название: The Best Works of Balzac
Автор: Оноре де Бальзак
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664560742
isbn:
dream! Have I not met on this earth with an angel who had made me
know all its happiness, as a reward, perhaps, for having endured
all its torments? Angel of heaven, I salute thee with a kiss.
"I shall send you this hymn of thanksgiving from my heart, I owe
it to you; but it can hardly express my gratitude or the morning
worship my heart offers up day by day to her who epitomized the
whole gospel of the heart in this divine word: 'Believe.'"
V
"What! no further difficulties, dearest heart! We shall be free to
belong to each other every day, every hour, every minute, and for
ever! We may be as happy for all the days of our life as we now
are by stealth, at rare intervals! Our pure, deep feelings will
assume the expression of the thousand fond acts I have dreamed of.
For me your little foot will be bared, you will be wholly mine!
Such happiness kills me; it is too much for me. My head is too
weak, it will burst with the vehemence of my ideas. I cry and I
laugh—I am possessed! Every joy is an arrow of flame; it pierces
and burns me. In fancy you rise before my eyes, ravished and
dazzled by numberless and capricious images of delight.
"In short, our whole future life is before me—its torrents, its
still places, its joys; it seethes, it flows on, it lies sleeping;
then again it awakes fresh and young. I see myself and you side by
side, walking with equal pace, living in the same thought; each
dwelling in each other's heart, understanding each other,
responding to each other as an echo catches and repeats a sound
across wide distances.
"Can life be long when it is thus consumed hour by hour? Shall we
not die in a first embrace? What if our souls have already met in
that sweet evening kiss which almost overpowered us—a feeling
kiss, but the crown of my hopes, the ineffectual expression of all
the prayers I breathe while we are apart, hidden in my soul like
remorse?
"I, who would creep back and hide in the hedge only to hear your
footsteps as you went homewards—I may henceforth admire you at my
leisure, see you busy, moving, smiling, prattling! An endless joy!
You cannot imagine all the gladness it is to me to see you going
and coming; only a man can know that deep delight. Your least
movement gives me greater pleasure than a mother even can feel as
she sees her child asleep or at play. I love you with every kind
of love in one. The grace of your least gesture is always new to
me. I fancy I could spend whole nights breathing your breath; I
would I could steal into every detail of your life, be the very
substance of your thoughts—be your very self.
"Well, we shall, at any rate, never part again! No human alloy
shall ever disturb our love, infinite in its phases and as pure as
all things are which are One—our love, vast as the sea, vast as
the sky! You are mine! all mine! I may look into the depths of
your eyes to read the sweet soul that alternately hides and shines
there, to anticipate your wishes.
"My best-beloved, listen to some things I have never yet dared to
tell you, but which I may confess to you now. I felt a certain
bashfulness of soul which hindered the full expression of my
feelings, so I strove to shroud them under the garbs of thoughts.
But now I long to lay my heart bare before you, to tell you of the
ardor of my dreams, to reveal the boiling demands of my senses,
excited, no doubt, by the solitude in which I have lived,
perpetually fired by conceptions of happiness, and aroused by you,
so fair in form, so attractive in manner. How can I express to you
my thirst for the unknown rapture of possessing an adored wife, a
rapture to which the union of two souls by love must give frenzied
intensity. Yes, my Pauline, I have sat for hours in a sort of
stupor caused by the violence of my passionate yearning, lost in
the dream of a caress as though in a bottomless abyss. At such
moments my whole vitality, my thoughts and powers, are merged and
united in what I must call desire, for lack of a word to express
that nameless delirium.
"And I may confess to you now that one day, when I would not take
your hand when you offered it so sweetly—an act of melancholy
prudence that made you doubt my love—I was in one of those fits
of madness when a man could commit a murder to possess a woman.
Yes, if I had felt the exquisite pressure you offered me as
vividly as I heard your voice in my heart, I know not to what
lengths my passion might not have carried me. But I can be silent,
and suffer a great deal. Why speak of this anguish when my visions
are to become realities? It will be in my power now to make life
one long love-making!
"Dearest СКАЧАТЬ