My happiness lasted but a short time.... My happiness!... It is really remarkable that never, never have I been permitted to enjoy anything fully, and that invariably anxiety came to disturb the brief periods of my happiness. Defenseless and powerless against suffering, not sure of myself and timid in the hours of happiness--such I have been all my life. Is it a tendency peculiar to my nature? A strange perversion of my sensibilities?... Or is it rather that happiness in my own case as well as in the case of everybody else is really deceptive, and that it is nothing but a more tormenting and more refined form of universal suffering?...
Now this for example.... The faint glimmer of the night-lamp flickers feebly upon the curtains and the furniture; Juliette is asleep, early in the morning, the morning after our first night. One of her arms, bare, rests upon the sheet; the other, also bare, is gracefully coiled up under her nape. All around her face--which reflects the pallid light of the bed, a face which looks like that of a murdered person, with eyes encircled by dark rings--her loose black hair is scattered, sinuous and flowing like waves! I contemplate her eagerly.... She is sleeping close to me, with a deep calm sleep, like a child. And for the first time possession occasions no regret, no disgust in me; for the first time I am able to look at a woman who has just given herself to me. I cannot express my feelings at this moment. What I feel is something indefinable, something exceedingly sweet and at the same time very grave and holy, a sort of religious ecstasy similar to the one which I experienced at the time of my first communion.... I recognize the same mystic transport, the same great and sacred awe; it is like another revelation of God taking place in the transplendent light of my soul.... It seems to me that God has come down to me for the second time.... She sleeps, in the silence of the room, with her mouth half-open, her nostrils motionless; she sleeps with a sleep so gentle that I cannot even hear her breathing.... A flower on the mantlepiece is there, withering, and a whiff of its dying fragrance reaches me. I can't hear Juliette at all, she is only asleep, she is breathing, she is alive and yet I can't hear her. I move nearer to her and gently bend over her, almost touching her with my lips, and in an almost inaudible voice I call her.