I could believe
this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would
bring that savour to my senses were themselves of a particular kind,
yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from any but herself) since
I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has
not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women
in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a
general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable
instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure
does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the
ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of
the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does
one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself. Obscurely
awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the
moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we
find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it
seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for
the kindness of heart of our companion and for her touching predilection
of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits, by the happiness that she
showers upon us.
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