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senses. Flushed in the face and stimulated by the fires of pleasure, they both seemed to my eyes to be simply sparkling all over. These furiously amorous devotees of passion lent poetry to the excess of their lust: they appealed to the senses and the imagination at the same time.
It was no use trying to reason with myself, and to condemn these erotic follies in my heart; I soon felt myself moved, excited, possessed with desire. Finding myself absolutely unable to reach those nude women, I felt like a wild beast tormented at rutting time in a cage, through the bars of which he could see his female.
I stood stupidly still, my head fixed to the aperture whence I was, so to speak, inhaling my torture, a real torture of the damned, terrible, unbearable. A torture that seizes you first by the head, then runs in the blood, then into the bones and the spinal marrow, which seems then to burn. It seemed to me that my nerves were in such a frightful state of tension, that they must break. My clenched bands gripped the floor. I no longer breathed properly, I was foaming at the mouth.
My head turned round and round. I was going mad. I felt my manly force unruly
