Page:Musset - Gamiani, or Two Passionate Nights.djvu/39

 I wanted to know the truth; I used every artifice my mind could devise, but all in vain; I could never come to any satisfactory solution of the mystery.

Feeling piqued at my continued failure, I was going away from the scene, when an old roué standing behind me, said loud enough for me to hear: "Pooh, she's a tribade, a Lesbian."

This was like a flash of lightning to me: I immediately thought of a thousand reasons for believing this, there could be no mistake.

A tribade! Ah! this word sounds strangely in ones ears. Then it raises in ones mind I know not what murky images of unheard of sensations, lustful in the extreme. It means voluptuous madness, unbridled vice, a criminal enjoyment that is ever incomplete.

Vainly I strove to thrust these ideas from me; for a time my imagination ran riot. I closed my eyes, only to see the Countess before me, nude, in another woman's arms, her hair undone and streaming around her panting body, always tormented with half-satisfied desire.

My veins seemed filled with liquid fire, my senses reeled, I fell back half unconscious on a sofa.