wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves described by
the eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the face, the
purity of its clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick, drooping
lashes which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was more
than a woman; she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation
there was love enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties
calculated to satisfy the most exacting critic.

"Sarrasine devoured with his eyes what seemed to him Pygmalion's
statue descended from its pedestal. When La Zambinella sang, he was
beside himself. He was cold; then suddenly he felt a fire burning in
the secret depths of his being, in what, for lack of a better word, we
call the heart. He did not applaud, he said nothing; he felt a mad
impulse, a sort of frenzy of the sort that seizes us only at the age
when there is a something indefinably terrible and infernal in our
desires. Sarrasine longed to rush upon the stage and seize that woman.
His strength, increased a hundredfold by a moral depression impossible
to describe,--for such phenomena take place in a sphere inaccessible
to human observation,--insisted upon manifesting itself with
deplorable violence. Looking at him, you would have said that he was a
cold, dull man. Renown, science, future, life, prizes, all vanished.

"'To win her love or die!' Such was the sentence Sarrasine pronounced
upon himself.

"He was so completely intoxicated that he no longer saw theatre,
audience, or actors, no longer heard the music. Nay, more, there was
no space between him and La Zambinella; he possessed her; his eyes,
fixed steadfastly upon her, took possession of her. An almost
diabolical power enabled him to feel the breath of that voice, to