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Ah! proud and traitorous old age!

Why have you so soon brought me low? Why do you hold me so that I cannot strike and with the stroke end my sorrow?

When I think wearily on what I was, of what I am, when I see how changed I am—poor, dried-up, thin—I am enraged! Where is my white forehead—my golden hair—my beautiful shoulders, all in me made for love? This is the end of human beauty! These short arms, these thin hands, these humped shoulders. These breasts—these hips—these limbs—dried and speckled as sausages!

Yet one day you will be like this—like this horrible contamination—thou star of my eyes, thou sun of my nature, oh my angel and my passion! Yes, such will you be, oh Queen of the Graces, after the last sacraments—when you are laid under the grass and the flowers, there to crumble among the bones. Then oh, my beautiful one! tell the worms, when they devour you with kisses, that in spite of them, in spite of all, I have kept the form and the divine essence of my love who has perished.

Flesh of the woman, ideal clay; oh sublime penetration of the spirit in the slime; matter, where the soul shines through its shroud; clay, where one sees the fingers of the divine sculptor; august dust, which draws kisses, and the heart of man; so holy that one does not know—so entirely is love the conqueror, so entirely is the soul drawn—whether this passion is not a divine thought; so holy that one cannot, in the hour when the senses are on fire, hold beauty without embracing God!

We never see but one side of things—the other is plunged in night and mystery. Man suffers the effect without knowing the cause. All that he sees is short, useless, and fleeting.

As when, in taking flight, the bird bends the branch, so his soul had bruised his body.