age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image
they have constantly borne within themselves. For them that would be the
age for love.

"The age for being loved?" he continued. "The deepest of all the passions
I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my masters, a
poet, and he was sixty years old at the time. It is true that he still
held himself as erect as a young man, he came and went with a step as
light as yours, he conversed like Rivarol, he composed verses as beautiful
as De Vigny's. He was besides very poor, very lonely and very unhappy,
having lost one after another, his wife and his children. You remember the
words of Shakespeare's Moor: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
and I loved her that she did pity them.'

"So it was that this great artist inspired in a beautiful, noble and
wealthy young Russian woman, a devotion so passionate that because of him
she never married. She found a way to take care of him, day and night, in
spite of his family, during his last illness, and at the present time,
having bought from his heirs all of the poet's personal belongings, she
keeps the apartment where he lived just as it was at the time of his
death. That was years ago. In her case she found in a man three times her
own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried
in her heart. Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict
feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and
insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day. In
order that a sixty-year-old lover should appear neither ridiculous nor
odious you must apply to him what the elder Corneille so proudly said of
himself in his lines to the marquise:

"'Cependant, j'ai quelques charmes