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the phrases well turned, harmonious… . Oh, what sacrilege!! Only at the end did the poetic emotion revive in me and, with a torrent of delicious tears, I felt that thrill.
Oh, if only my heart doesn’t dry up! I so fear that life may blunt my heart and senses. I am growing old. Already those great ideas of God, the Spirit, Love, are ceasing to make my bosom throb as once they did, and at times I feel Doubt gnawing at my heart. How sad it all is! Why can’t we live with all the might of our souls, instead of reasoning? We think too much ! I envy the vitality of youth which blindly flings itself into every danger without taking thought. How I would love to sacrifice myself, with closed eyes, to a sublime Idea, to an ideal and immaculate Woman, instead of being always thrown back on myself. How dreadful they are, these longings which have no outlet!
You congratulate me on my earnestness. You are wrong; it is my curse, my evil destiny! I am not like the questing bee who goes to suck the honey from flower to flower. I am like the beetle that installs itself in the bosom of a single rose, in which it lives till the petals close about it and it dies suffocated in that last passionate embrace—the embrace of that one flower singled out from all the rest.
My devotion to you, my dear, is like that—faithful till death. You are that tender rose which, in the desolation of the earth, has opened its heart to me. In the depths of your loving heart bury my black despair!
D.

P.S. You can write to my house without danger during the Easter hols. My mother never interferes with my letters (not that they’re anything very special!).
I have just finished Zola’s La Débâcle . I can lend it to you. I haven’t yet got over the emotions it produced. It has such wonderful power, such depth! I am going to begin Werther . There, my dear, we have at last the book of books. I have also taken Gyp’s Elle et Lui , but I shall read Werther first.
D.
    Jacques replied in a severe tone.

    For my friend’s fourteenth birthday.

In the universe there is a man who by day suffers unspeakable torments and who cannot sleep of nights, who feels in his heart an aching void that sensual pleasure cannot fill and in his head a fearful chaos of his faculties; who in the giddy whirl of pleasure, amongst his gay companions, feels, of a sudden, solitude with dark wings hovering above his heart. In the universe there is a man who hopes for nothing, and fears nothing, who loathes life and has not the strength to leave it; ‘tis HE WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD!!
    P.S. Keep this. You will read it again when you are utterly forsaken and lift your voice in vain amid the darkness.
    J.

    “Have you been working during the hols.?” Daniel asked at the top of another page.
    Jacques’s answer followed:

I have just completed a poem in the same style as my “Harmodius and Aristogeiton.” It begins rather neatly:

    Hail, Ccesar! Lo, the blue-eyed maid from Gaul
    Dancing for thee the dance of her dear land,
    Like a river-lotus ‘neath the snowy flight of swans.
    A shudder passes through her swaying form.
    Hail, Emperor I … See the huge blade flash
    In the fierce sword-dance of her far-off home… .

And so on… . Here’s the end:

    Caesar, thou growest pale! Alas, ah, thrice alas!
    Her sword’s jell point has pierced the lovely throat.
    The cup falls jrom her hand, the blue eyes close,
    All her white nakedness is red with blood,
    Red in the pale light of the moon… .
    Beside the great fire flaring on the lakeside
    Ended is the dance
    Of the white warrior maid at Caesar’s feast.

I call it “The Crimson Offering” and I have a mimed dance to go with it. I would like to dedicate it to the divine Loie Fuller, and for her to dance it at the Olympia. Do you think she’d do it?
    Still, some days ago I took an irrevocable decision to return to the regular metres and rhymed verse of our great classics. (Really, I think I “despised” them because they are more