THE LIE
I
For some time they had ceased to speak, too oppressed with the needless
anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny shining windows
of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under
the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the
obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had
faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff,
heralded the red rise of the moon.
He held himself a little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail
of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching
the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the
dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed
line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his
eyes slowly mingled the earth with the sea and the sea with the sky,
seemed less mysterious than this woman whose body was as immobile as the
stillness in her soul.
All at once he felt in her, whom he had known as he had known no other,
something unknown, the coming of another woman, belonging to another
life, the life of the opera and the multitude, which would again flatter
and intoxicate her.
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