And these were, as often as not, women whose
beauty was of a distinctly 'common' type, for the physical qualities which
attracted him instinctively, and without reason, were the direct opposite
of those that he admired in the women painted or sculptured by his
favourite masters. Depth of character, or a melancholy expression on a
woman's face would freeze his senses, which would, however, immediately
melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh.
If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct for
him to make no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his eye,
adorned with a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his 'high
horse' and to cheat the desire that she had kindled in him, to substitute
a pleasure different from that which he might have tasted in her company
by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come and join him,
would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the face of life, as
stupid a renunciation of a new form of happiness as if, instead of
visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in his own rooms
and looked at 'views' of Paris.
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