then a hundred, then a thousand and a hundred, after a hundred and a thousand: until, when we have delighted in these thousands, we mix them all together,

so that we ourselves lose count of them, and no envier can look our way who knows the tally of the kisses we have stolen.

And you two have no envier — so sip them in bliss: for between the dawning of your sun and its setting is but a moment.

And Lesbia asks how many of her kisses would suffice him and sate him:

As many as the Libyan sands in Kairouan, or as many as the stars that watch, while the night is silent, over the trysts of love men steal.

And they mourn Catullus: he died before thirty. But one year that he lived is enough for him — as though he had lived long. Is not every night in which he took his delight with his Lesbia worth years of a life of misery and bewilderment? And this beauty that floods over him is too precious to endure.

And what beauty! As though she were the light, and the women around her shadows: Does this one boast of a pair of eyes, and that one of a bosom? Do you love a pair of lips in a mistress, and a figure in a wife? Have it so — but come, gaze upon my Lesbia: she has stolen for her own delight the eyes of this one and the bosom of that one, she has seized for herself the lips of your mistress and the figure of your wife, and gathered into herself all the charm and splendor in all beautiful women.

He loves her. O God, why did You deny mankind love, and let none know it but him? And can any woman in existence ever boast of a love bestowed upon her, as Lesbia can? For he gave her his very self, and consecrated to her his love and his poetry — and his invective: her enemies got a share of it, and her friends shares upon shares.

Even her little bird he detested, for it monopolized her lap; and when it met its end he turned his blame upon the glooms of death that swallow down every lovely thing: for by what they had done, the eyes of his beloved were reddened and swollen with wailing.

•

And Catullus was in raptures, while Clodia kept her brazen composure. She tilted her cup toward a new boon companion, and with it tilted the glances of her eyes.

And Catullus? How could she cast him off so, when he had robed her in garments of purple, and bestowed upon her such attributes of beauty as made her the idol of the fair? She acknowledges the favor he has

done her; only she is confident that she has bound him fast, and thrown him into a captivity from which he will not easily free himself. What harm to her, then, if she turns to another — and in constancy to one there is tedium?

And what is it to her, or to him, if jealousy blazes — is there love without jealousy?

And see: one smile of hers at a comrade of his robs him of every sense he has: his tongue stammers, flame leaps through the delicate limbs of his body, his ears ring of their own accord, and his eyes are lost in pitch-dark night.

And his life became a restlessness that knew no settling. She turns toward him, and his face changes color and spring runs in his veins; she turns from him, and life is a hell, and scorpions crawl out of his verse; she comes back to him, and with her comes back a hope in leaf, and its luster.

And she knows this of him; and were it not for her confidence in his enslavement, she would have been guarded in her recklessness, or would have left him beyond all return. So she made of it a continuing game: rebuff and welcome, following one upon the other, time after time after time — for the disease is one, and the remedy one.

And he beholds the state he is in, yet cannot make out what it points to. Does she truly betray him? Is it his own trust, or a trick of appearances? And the bleeding heart that beats in his breast refuses to do anything but reassure him, as though to postpone the catastrophe; so some of his visions return to his pale face, and he tells himself again that Lesbia loves none but him:

Lesbia opens her mouth to revile me, and forever speaks ill of me. Yet may I die if she does not love me! The proof? Her case is my own: do I not speak ill of her, I too — and may I die if I do not love her!

•

But the catastrophe was on its way.

And now loathing began to stir within his love — though it was a lover's loathing, not the loathing of foes. He loves and he hates, and does not know how his heart can be peopled by both passions at once; he knows only that he hates and loves, and that he is, therefore, wretched.

And she is far from him, far from the current of his thought. Shall he beg her to return to him? Shout, Catullus, in a forest — even the echo comes back nowhere but in your poem.

Shall he implore the comrades of yesterday, the adversaries of today, not to forget him?

And Lesbia took up her game again: she leaned