The Louvre. All the Paintings

Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work? I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul. First of all I wished to destroy, or at least to qualify, the universal opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all paint it crowded with roses of illusion: Juliet is only fourteen; Romeo, having lost his love, refuses life; Goethe follows Shakespeare in his Mignon and Marguerite; even the great humorist Heine and the so-called realist Balzac adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from thirteen to twenty: the sex urge, the lust of the flesh, was so overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the rattlesnake's poison bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves, even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen. I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly woman, that is, a woman whom I didn't desire ...»