REMY DE GOURMONT
305
VIII
Below the hair, above the eyes and their brows, the forehead is extended where it is said thought is elaborated. But one thinks also with the hands, with the knees, with the eyes, with the mouth, and with the heart. One thinks with all the organs, and, to speak truly,
We are perhaps only thought, only thinking matter and electric matter. But the invisible corresponds to the invisible. Let us draw the curtain of the brow over the mystery of the brow. The plain of the forehead has a kind of exterior and luminous life.
It wrinkles like a surface of water and shines like an expanse of sand. Though unassailable, the forehead is sensitive. It is sweet to feel on one's brow the touch
Of the cool hands that one loves, but the lover does not kiss the enigma of the brow. He seeks softer parts, elastic and yielding.
The lover first addresses the mouth.
IX
The kiss on the mouth opens it. The kiss on the eyes closes them. The eyes still want that I contemplate them and that I heed them, for they are inexhaustible. The eyes have caprices. They play hide-and-seek. They glance to right, to left, above,
Below, within, or not at all, but fix in space the group of dreams which is unrolled. But above all I have not told how the eyes are full of esthetics. They love curves, spheres, and columns, that which rises and that which coils,
The embraces and flight of horizons, the water which flows and the ship which floats, chalices, hilltops, and the subordinate geometry of the human body. The eyes rest on the softness
Of valves and the softness of women. There they grow tender. There they build seductive homes and deposit the finally disentangled skein in a vase far from the velvet paws of fate.
X
Eyes are not always happy. They weep, to become more beautiful and to acquire the grace of sadness. They weep to be consoled, but there are those which cannot weep and yet are sad, sad as eternal life, and these eyes,
