One of Cleopatra's Nights by Théophile Gautier

Author:Théophile Gautier [Gautier, Théophile]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781169835818
Publisher: Kessinger Publishing
Published: 1882-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Arria Marcella made a sign to Octavian to lie down upon the biclinium beside her and share her repast. Half-maddened with astonishment and love, the young man took at random a few mouthfuls from the plates extended to him by little curly-haired Asiatic slaves, who wore short tunics. Arria did not eat, but she frequently raised to her lips an opal-tinted myrrhine vase filled with a wine darkly purple like thickened blood. As she drank an imperceptible rosy vapor mounted to her cheeks from her heart, the heart that had never throbbed for so many centuries; nevertheless, her bare arm, which Octavian lightly touched in the act of raising his cup, was cold as the skin of a serpent or the marble of a tomb.

"Ah, when you paused in the Studii Museum to contemplate the mass of hardened clay which still preserves my form," exclaimed Arria Marcella, turning her long, liquid eyes upon Octavian, "and your thoughts were ardently directed to me, my spirit felt it in that world where I float, invisible to vulgar eyes. Faith makes God, and love makes woman. One is truly dead only when one is no longer loved. Your desire has restored life to me. The mighty invocation of your heart overcame the dim distances that separated us."

The idea of amorous invocation which the young woman spoke of entered into the philosophic beliefs of Octavian, beliefs which we ourselves are not far from sharing.

In effect, nothing dies; all things are eternal. No power can annihilate that which once had being. Every action, every word, every thought which has fallen into the universal ocean of being, therein creates circles which travel, and increase in travelling, even to the confines of eternity. To vulgar eyes only do natural forms disappear, and the spectres which have thence detached themselves people Infinity. Paris, in some unknown region of space, continues to carry off Helen. The galley of Cleopatra still floats down with swelling sails of silk upon the azure current of an ideal Cydnus. A few passionate and powerful minds have been able to recall before them ages apparently long passed away, and to restore to life personages dead to all the world beside. Faust has had for his mistress the daughter of Tyndarus, and conducted her to his Gothic castle in the depths of the mysterious abysses of Hades. Octavian had been able to live a day under the reign of Titus, and to make himself beloved of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, she who was at that moment lying upon an antique couch beside him in a city destroyed for all the rest of the world.

"From my disgust with other women," replied Octavian, "from the unconquerable reverie which attracted me toward its radiant shapes as to stars that lure on, I knew that I could never love save beyond the confines of Time and Space. It was you that I awaited; and that frail vestige of your being, preserved by the curiosity of men, has by its secret magnetism placed me in communication with your spirit.

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