CHAPTER IV

A HEART BENEATH A STONE


The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion
of a single being even to God, that is love.


Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.


How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!


What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills
the world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God.
One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God
the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul
for love.


The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace
of dreams.


God is behind everything, but everything
hides God. Things are black, creatures
are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.


Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices,
which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are
prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other;
they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond.
They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers,
the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings
of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. And why not?
All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently
potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.


The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds.
Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity.
In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.


Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature.
Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible,
indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists
within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine,
and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the
very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths
of heaven.


Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which
penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls
by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes
dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the
lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.


God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is,
in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the
ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world,
is impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven;
love is the plenitude of man.


You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous,
and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter
radiance and a greater mystery, woman.


All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air
and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.


When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred
and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered
so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything
more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they
are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.


On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks,
you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do:
to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.


What love commences can be finished by God alone.


True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost
or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its
devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely
great and the infinitely little.


If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the
sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.


Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise;
we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love.
Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well
as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.


"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here."
"Does she still live in this house?" "She has moved away."
"Where has she gone to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses.
Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which
makes a child of him!


There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night.
There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.


Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave,
hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing
a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!


Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love,
is to live in it.


Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
There is ecstasy in agony.


Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.


Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.


Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a
long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny.
This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step
inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to
distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word.
The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself
to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer,
hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved
only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all.
Try to love souls, you will find them again.


I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes;
water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.


What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing
it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion.
It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer
rests on anything that is not elevated and great. An unworthy
thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier.
The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions,
dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies,
its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue
of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean
shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks
of earthquake.


If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.