She had kept her promise: her mask had fallen, but large circles had replaced it around her eyes! Other masks were about to settle all over her, like flakes of purple snow: the cadaverous, marmoreal veins that begin at the nostrils and the belly.

The marble of life was still pure and luminous: at her throat and her hips was the same imperceptible blight as on freshly cut ivory.

Delicately raising his mistress’s eyelids, Marcueil discovered that he had never seen the color of her eyes. They were so dark as to defy all color, like the dark, dead leaves at the bottom of the limpid Lurance moat, and they seemed like two wells in her skull, sunk for the joy of seeing her hair from the inside.

Her teeth were minute and well-kept toys. Death had carefully closed up the two rows, like tiny, unspotted dominoes – too childish for counting to matter – in a child’s surprise box.

Her ears, there was no doubt, had been “hemmed” by some lacemaker.

The tips of her breasts were curious, pink things, which looked like each other, and like nothing else.

Her genitals seemed like a small, eminently stupid animal, as stupid as a shellfish – really, there was quite a resemblance – but not less pink.

The Supermale perceived that he was engaged in discovering Woman, an exploration for which he had not before had the leisure.

Assiduous lovemaking leaves no time to experience love.

He kissed all his discoveries like rare gems with which he would soon be obliged to part forever.

He kissed them – a thing he had not previously thought of doing, imagining that it would be evidence of a momentary impotence where more virile caresses were concerned – he kissed them to thank them for his discovery of them; he nearly thought: for his having invented them.

And he began to sink softly down beside his companion, who was asleep in the absolute, just as the first man had awoken near Eve and thought that she had come out of his side because she was beside him, in his quite natural surprise at finding the first woman, whom Jove had made to blossom, in the place where some still anthropoid female had slept before.

He murmured her name, the meaning of which he now understood for the first time:

“Helen, Helen!”

“Helen, Helen!” sang melodiously through his brain, as though the phonograph were still playing and imposing its rhythm.

And Marcueil perceived that at this stage of his spent energies, when another man would have been fatigued, he was becoming sentimental. This was his transformation of the post coitum animal triste. Just as love had been restful for his legs, by a similar equilibrium his brain, in its turn, wanted to become active. And, just to send himself asleep, he composed some verses.

A naked woman, arms outstretched, the fount

Of all desire, saying: Can it be?

Eyes aflame with ineffable ecstasy –