Page:Musset - Gamiani, or Two Passionate Nights.djvu/79

 by visions of riper girls, women matured to all the passions of love.

Some of them were living and palpitating Venuses; others pale and melancholy as the virgins of Ossian. Their delicate forms, voluptuous in their contours, faded from my view under clouds of vaporous atmosphere; they seemed to die away, weary of waiting for my embrace, they held out their arms, but vanished always from my eager sight.

I was a prey to the most terrible sensual urge, I rose to my feet, my spine and muscles quite rigid, and rubbed my glorious standing priapus up and down like a madman. I spoke out loud to myself of love, of pleasure; in the most frantically indecent terms, I seemed to see Jupiter in his clouds of fire; Juno directing the thunderbolts; I saw all Olympus in the disorder of a genesic fever, an extraordinary mêlée; after that, I was witness to an orgy, a hellish bacchanal feast.

Hundreds of satyrs, with their cloven hoofs and horned heads, ran round in an infernal cave lighted by blue and red torches, and the grotesqueness of their gestures made an indescribably lascivious scene. Some of them there were, on swings,