The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX succumbs to sleep, he holds in horror everything which might wake him. It is the same with the hallucinated, with statical somnambulists, maniacs, epileptics, and all those who abandon themselves to the delirium of a passion. They have heard the fatal music, they have entered into the dance of death; and they feel themselves dragged away into the whirl of vertigo. You speak to them, they no more hear you; you warn them, they no longer understand you, but your voice annoys them; they are asleep with the sleep of death. Death is a current which carries you away, a whirlpool which draws you down, but from the bottom of which the least movement may make you climb again. The force of repulsion being equal to that of attraction, at the very moment of expiring, one often attaches oneself again violently to life. Often also, by the same law of equilibrium, one passes from sleep to death through complaisance for sleep. A shallop sways upon the shores of the lake. The child enters the water, which, shining with a thousand reflec- tions, dances around him and calls him; the chain which retains the boat stretches and seems to wish to break itself; then a marvellous bird shoots out from the bank, and skims, singing, upon the joyous waves ; the child wishes to follow it, he puts his hand upon the chain, he detaches the ring. Antiquity divined the mystery of the attraction of death, and represented it in the fable of Hylas. Weary with a long voyage, Hylas has arrived in a flowered, enamelled isle; he approaches a fountain to draw water; a gracious mirage smiles at him ; he sees a nymph stretch out her arms to him, his own lose nerve, and cannot draw back the heavy jar; the fresh fragrance of the spring puts him to sleep; the perfumes 120