Little Poems in Prose

nary answer. If you were to thrash the wall or the curtain you would draw more sighs from them than the ecstasies of the most frenzied love would draw from the breast of my mis- tress. After a year of life together she admitted to me that she had never known what pleasure was. I became disgusted with the unequal con- test, and this incomparable girl got married. Later, the fancy took me to see her again, and she said, presenting to me six fine children, ‘Ah well, my dear, the wife is still as virgin as your mistress was.’ In her nothing had changed. Sometime I regret her; I ought to have married her.” The others began to laugh, and the third said in his turn: “Gentlemen, I have known enjoyments which you have possibly neglected—I mean the comic side of love; a side which does not ex- clude admiration. I admired my last mistress more than I think you hated or loved yours. And everyone admired her as much as I did. When we went into a restaurant, at the end of some minutes everyone forgot to eat in order to look at her. The waiters themselves, and the lady at the cash-desk, felt the contagious ec- stasy so strangely that they would forget their duties. In short, I lived for some time alone with a living phenomenon. She ate, chewed,