Woman
The being who is, for the most part of men, the source of the most life, and also, say it to the shame of philosophical voluptés, the most durable of jouissance; the being to which to their own profit they tend to enforce all of their efforts; this terrible being who is as incommunicable as God ( with the difference that infinity does not communicate because it blinds and crushes the finite, however the being that we speak of is perhaps only incommunicable in the sense that she has nothing tocommunicate) ; that being is Joseph de Maistre see un belle animal which the graces brightened to make easier the serious game of politics; for whom and by whom arefortunes made and lost; for whom, but most of all by whom artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; and of whom derive the most unnerving pleasures and the most painful sorrows, woman, in a word, is not just for the artistin general, and for M.G. in particular, the female of the man. She is more a divinity, a star, who presides over all of the conceptions of the male; she is a glimmer of all the graces in nature condensed in a sole being; she is the object of admiration and the most lively curiosity which can be offered up to contemplate. She is a kind of iidol, stupid perhaps, but sparkling, an enchantress, who holds destiny and the will suspended in her gaze. She is not, I say, an animal of which the members, correctlyassembled, furnish a perfect example of harmony; she is not also the type of beautywhich is pure, of which for the sculptor might dream of in his most serious meditations; no, it would not be sufficient to explain the mysterious and complexenchantment. We have only to with Winckelmann and to Raphael; and I am surewith M.G., despite all of the extent of his intelligence ( that being said without wanting to be critical ), overlooking a piece of ancient statue, if it were to lose him the occasion to savour a portrait by Reynolds or by Lawrence.
( TO BE CONTINUED )
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