For a day they hated and despised themselves as never before. For a day they hated themselves fiercely. Then that shadow, that coldness, and that boredom ruled over them, whose signs they had piously hidden in Rome, but which at last in Venice they no longer dared conceal.
“Since you as ever appear to me what you are, a creature of truth, and since you tell me briefly and honestly--and in reading I almost seem to hear your voice--‘Marco, our dream is over,’ I ought to elevate my spirit to your moral height where a lie is impossible, and repeat loyally, ‘Maria, our dream is over.’ It was beautiful. No meanness disturbed its violent grandeur, no weakness spoiled its power, no hypocrisy disturbed its purity, and we indeed preferred to break the social knot rather than loosen it miserably. Moreover, we preferred to give a single sorrow to others rather than inflict ridicule and humiliation on them every day, and we preferred to exile and isolate ourselves than drag deception and fraud from drawing-room to drawing-room, from home to home. We lived so impetuously and ardently in a fulness and richness of life, which, darling Maria, neither of us will ever find again, which ought not to be found again because certain destinies have but one existence. Ours is past and the dream is ended. Nothing remains for us except the enduring memory of its beauty and intensity.
“We believed this dream to be eternal; we believed that it would have led us hand in hand together, full of desire and hope, even to the hour of death. Such is the measured small eternity of man! Not even was this true, not even was this modest cycle of years, modest compared with Time, just the life of a man and a woman, given to our dream. The hours, days, and years were limited, not by us, not by our enthusiasm, not by our anxiety, but by the laws of passion themselves, those immutable laws, alas! which each believes he can change, which each hopes to elude, and by which we are all dominated.
“Adored Maria, you have had from me all the love which a young man, impassioned and sincere, can give to an adorable woman such as you are; but love is a brief matter, with a brevity which frightens all desolate and tender souls, all faithful hearts and feeling fibres. He who says that he desires only one woman for all his life, either deceives or is deceived. We wished to be constant, faithful, and tenacious of our love, but it escaped us fatally, every day increasingly, till our devastated and cold hearts felt that that love had vanished, because thus it must be, since it is the law; since this brevity is the essential condition of its force and beauty, and this brevity is the reason of its perfidious fascination. We have loved each other, dearest Maria, for three years. A cynic would tell you that they are many, that they are too many--three years. But remember that a cynic always conceals a soul desolated by the reality of things. I shall tell you that the time has been just what it had to be, and, in telling you this, how my heart overflows with an intense bitterness against love’s fall, against the misery of this sentiment and its fugacity. Otherwise I had hoped, lady mine, otherwise we had hoped together. We believed, too, and feared that unhappiness and sorrow would have come to us from outside, from those whom we had abandoned, from laws which we had violated, from society which we had offended. Instead, all the inconsolable sadness of this moment comes from ourselves, from our dead souls, from our dead hearts and senses, where our love has lived, but from whence it has disappeared, leaving colourless ashes which the wind will carry away. Maria, how I should like to rise against myself, against my mortal weariness and indifference. I should like to galvanise my spirit, resuscitate this corpse, and I torture myself in vain, while tears of useless anger course my cheeks. Maria, I am dying through not loving you, but I cannot live to love you.