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which is the virgin, on the other, the wife. He questioned himself
anxiously. A blush, as it were, overspread his mind. The Gwynplaine of
long ago had been transformed, by degrees, unconsciously in a mysterious
growth. His old modesty was becoming misty and uneasy. We have an ear of
light, into which speaks the spirit; and an ear of darkness, into which
speaks the instinct. Into the latter strange voices were making their
proposals. However pure-minded may be the youth who dreams of love, a
certain grossness of the flesh eventually comes between his dream and
him. Intentions lose their transparency. The unavowed desire implanted
by nature enters into his conscience. Gwynplaine felt an indescribable
yearning of the flesh, which abounds in all temptation, and Dea was
scarcely flesh. In this fever, which he knew to be unhealthy, he
transfigured Dea into a more material aspect, and tried to exaggerate
her seraphic form into feminine loveliness. It is thou, O woman, that we
require.
Love comes not to permit too much of paradise. It requires the fevered
skin, the troubled life, the unbound hair, the kiss electrical and
irreparable, the clasp of desire. The sidereal is embarrassing, the
ethereal is heavy. Too much of the heavenly in love is like too much
fuel on a fire: the flame suffers from it. Gwynplaine fell into an
exquisite nightmare; Dea to be clasped in his arms--Dea clasped in them!
He heard nature in his heart crying out for a woman. Like a Pygmalion in
a dream modelling a Galathea out of the azure, in the depths of his soul
he worked at the chaste contour of Dea--a contour with too much of
heaven, too little of Eden. For Eden is Eve, and Eve was a female, a
carnal mother, a terrestrial nurse; the sacred womb of generations; the
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