sensuousness of the Greeks--pleasure without pain. I do not believe
in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the
moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse
than a heretic, I am a pagan.

'Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel
When in Ida's grove she was pleased with the hero Achilles?'

"These lines from Goethe's _Roman Elegy_ have always delighted me.

"In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, 'when gods and
goddesses loved.' At that time 'desire followed the glance, enjoyment
desire.' All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose
cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the
monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its
innocent instincts.

"The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern
man. I do not care to have a share in it."

"Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame," I replied,
"but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of
all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia,
with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example,
we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne.

"We prefer one of Holbein's meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly
ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is,
but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after.
And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing,