La chair, hélas, est triste, et j'ai lu tous les livres. - Stéphane Mallarmé

These nymphs I would perpetuate. So clear Their light carnation, that it floats in the air Heavy with tufted slumbers. <p> Was it a dream I loved?

The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice [vicieux] yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present [apparence fausse de présent]. That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror [sans briser la glace]; he thus sets up a medium [milieu], a pure medium, of fiction.

I, proud of my rumour, for long I will talk Of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous, From their shades unloose yet more of their girdles: So when of grapes the clearness I've sucked, To banish regret by my ruse disavowed, Laughing, I lift the empty bunch to the sky, Blowing into its luminous skins and athirst To be drunk, till the evening I keep looking through. Oh nymphs, we diverse MEMORIES refill.