Little Poems in Prose

to select; to be able to deliberate is already a decadence. It is then that one definitely hunts for beauty; as for me, gentlemen, I flatter my- self that I have arrived long since at the cli- macteric epoch of the third grade, when beauty itself no longer suffices unless it is sea- soned by perfume, adornment, and the rest. I will even admit that I sometimes aspire as if to an unknown happiness, to a certain fourth de- gree, whose stigma should be perfect calm; but, during my life, except at the age of Chérubin, I have been more sensitive than anyone else in the world to the enervating foolishness, the irritating mediocrity of women. What I love above all in animals is their frank- ness; judge them, what I must have suffered with my last mistress. “She was a prince’s bastard. Beautiful, it goes without saying; without that, why should I have taken her? But she spoilt that great quality by an unbecoming and deformed ambi- tion. She was a woman who always wished to play a man’s part:—’You are not a man; Oh, if only I were a man!—of us two it is I who am the man.’ Such were the insupportable refrains that came ever from that mouth from which surely only songs should have flown. Talking of a book, or a poem, or an opera, for which I happened to express my admiration, ‘You think