aside by an unseen hand. Taking this as a sign, he swung himself over
the sill into the room, and promptly closed window and grating behind
him. The curtain had fallen across his shoulders, so that he had to push
his way beneath it. Now he would have been in absolute darkness had
there not been shining from the depths of the distance, incredibly far
away, as if awakened by his own gaze, the faintest possible illumination
to show him the way. No more than three paces forward, and eager arms
enfolded him. Letting the sword slip from his hand, the cloak from his
shoulders, he gave himself up to his bliss.

From Marcolina's sigh of surrender, from the tears of happiness which
he kissed from her cheeks, from the ever-renewed warmth with which she
received his caresses, he felt sure that she shared his rapture; and
to him this rapture seemed more intense than he had ever experienced,
seemed to possess a new and strange quality. Pleasure became worship;
passion was transfused with an intense consciousness. Here at last was
the reality which he had often falsely imagined himself to be on the
point of attaining, and which had always eluded his grasp. He held in
his arms a woman upon whom he could squander himself, with whom he could
feel himself inexhaustible; the woman upon whose breast the moment of
ultimate self-abandonment and of renewed desire seemed to coalesce into
a single instant of hitherto unimagined spiritual ecstasy. Were not life
and death, time and eternity, one upon these lips? Was he not a god?
Were not youth and age merely a fable; visions of men's fancy? Were not
home and exile, splendor and misery, renown and oblivion, senseless
distinctions, fit only for the use of the uneasy, the lonely, the
frustrate; had not the words become unmeaning to one who was Casanova,
and who had found Marcolina?

More contemptible, more absurd, as the minutes passed, seemed to him