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76 xxxvii Moon Favors The Moon, caprice incarnate, looked through the window while you slept in your cradle and said, “This child pleases me.” And softly she descended her stairway of clouds and passed noiselessly through the windowpanes, then stretched out over you with the lithe tenderness of a mother and deposited her colors on your face. Your eyes have remained green and your cheeks extraordinarily pale. In contemplating this visitor it was, that your eyes became bizarrely enlarged; and she so gently clasped your throat that you have retained always the need to weep. Then, her joy increasing, the Moon filled the room with a phosphorescent atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all this living light gave thought and spoke: “You will remain eternally under the influence of my kiss. You will be beautiful in my fashion. You will love what I love and what returns my love: water, clouds, silence, night; the sea immense and green; formless and multiform waters; whatever place you are not; the lover you will never know; monstrous flowers; delirium-inducing perfumes; ecstatic cats on keyboards moaning like women with rough sweet voices! “And you will be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You will be queen of green-eyed men, whose throats I have also clasped in nocturnal caresses; queen of those who love the sea, the immense sea, tumultuous and green, formless and multiform waters, the place they are not, the woman they know not, sinister flowers resembling censers from some unknown religion, perfumes that puzzle the will, and wild voluptuous animals, emblems of their own madness.” And that, dear spoiled and accursed child, is why now I kneel at your feet, scrutinizing your self entire for a reflection of that formidable Divinity, fateful godmother, poisonous nurse of all lunatics. ...

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