de Villeparisis’s carriage moved fast. Scarcely had I time to see the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet⁠—as the beauty of people is not like the beauty of things, as we feel that it is that of an unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free will⁠—as soon as her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me, presented a tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete, in the depths of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious response of the pollen ready in me for the pistils that should receive it, I felt surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become conscious of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to someone else, without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to seize and occupy her heart. Meanwhile our carriage rolled away from her, the pretty girl was already left behind, and as she had⁠—of me⁠—none of those notions which constitute a person in one’s mind, her eyes which had barely seen me had forgotten me already. Was it because I had caught but a fragmentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? It may have been.