"Do you imagine that this would be possible for us?" Entragues asked.
He made no allusion to his personal sentiments, for even Calixte was not his confidant. In questioning his friend or in answering him, he spoke with full liberty, completely abstract.
"Yes," Calixte answered, "the 'Imitation' gives the clue. It suffices to transfer to a creature the love, proportionately lessened, which the priest feels towards God. It would be a sort of obligation to love which one would impose upon oneself, the first rule of a more general rule of life, freely and Chistianly accepted, once for all."
"I had not thought of this," Entragues said, "of love considered as a spiritual discipline."
"Such is the exact formula," Calixte declared. "If we can yet save ourselves, we and all similar monsters, it is through Christianity and Christian discipline. This will singularly elevate our souls and it may curb our transcendental egoisms!"
"We should require Beatrices," Hubert said.
"They can be created," Calixte responded, "and we can baptize a nobly profiled woman with divine love."
(Hubert received this note on the following day:
"It is perhaps quite compromising, but I am free. Be good enough to call for me at eight o'clock."
Then he began to dream of the joy of shared pleasures, and instantly the fourth chapter of _The Adorer_ found itself shaped.)
"Nous promenions notre visage (Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens) Sur maints charmes de paysage, O soeur, y comparant les tiens." Stéphane Mallarmé. _Prose pour des Esseintes._
The blond forest is filled with love: after the fall of sunlight and the night, smiling jewels.
"Together, our souls thrilled at the return of the primordial splendor; noons have not blinded us, for we have slept, during the heat of the day, in the shadow of our love: our tendernesses, like wings, fanned us and the freshness of our breath vaporized the perfumes.
"Like us, the forest filled with love has slept, for it is in our souls that its verdures have arisen, its birds, its drooping branches, its flowers, its murmurings and the dominating heights of its radiant trees.
"The blond forest is a body filled with love: it sleeps but sparingly and during our sleep, slumbering it sang, its body filled with love, and we heard the song of the blond forest: