... To Mireille ...

And here is a young man who has also lost his beloved. One wonders — why does death not take pity on lovers, and leave them those they love?!

Tomorrow, when the sun leans toward its setting... and when the dusk colors the beautiful horizon, our favorite pine will wait and wait in vain, for you will not come, my beloved. Its branches will ask after you and wait for you in their turn... and will find no answer but the wind's, which will toy with them violently, exactly as it used to do with your beautiful hair when it scattered it over your face... The wind will shake it angrily, as though saying to it: she will not come.

And the path, my beloved, will not know your steps after today... and the flowers along the path, too, will grieve that they will not see you. They will make themselves ready a long while, to win favor in your eyes, but your sweet fingers will not reach out to them; and old age will overtake the roses before you take a few of them for that beautiful hair.

Tomorrow everyone but I will say: she has gone... and will not return. As for me, nothing will change: you will remain with me, and always with me... We will steal our steps toward the pine, and we will slip in — until we lose ourselves — among the thickets. The difference between today and yesterday is that you will not speak with letters, nor walk with steps.

And the dawn... we were its rapturous song and its new heart; after today its golden threads will no longer reach into your room to warn you of its coming... In vain will it search for you, and it will find nothing but desolation and blackness.

Tomorrow there will end an era of insistent anxiety in whose shadow I lived through all the past years. On some days I was so generous that I wished you happiness however happiness might come to you, and hoped that my life might have some meaning for you; and on other days I was selfish to the point that I prayed you might lose all your beauty, so that you would remain mine alone. How often I reproached myself for that selfishness, and atoned for it by praying that you remain the loveliest of the beautiful, that you might be happy in your beauty.

Tomorrow you will become like dreams that live on in the conscience of their dreamer, their beauty unmarred by anything, and like hopes — a lamp whose flame never goes out. And your love will go on shedding its perfume and fragrance in my heart, however many days may pass.

★

You have died to all the world, my beloved, that you may live forever in my heart.