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Here I gave myself up to the old insipid privy shifts of my self-viewing, self-touching self-enjoying, in fine, to all the means of self knowledge I could devise, in search of the pleasure that fled before me, and tantalized with that unknown something that was out of my reach; thus all only served to enflame myself, and to provoke violently my desires, whilst the one thing needful to their satisfaction was not at hand, and I could have bit my finger for representing it so ill.
Around her on all sides is God, and Nature, who is here the face of God and not the slave of man. The spirit of the world hath here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day; and the Alps are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe which lives for its own ends.
As to his entertaining any superstitious crotchets about having his hair cut, the spirit of the age forbid it! The hair-dresser had the quality now rare among his class of unlimited and self-enjoying loquacity; soothing, because its little waves lapsed in objectless prattle on the beach of the apprehension, to be attended to or not at pleasure.
Not the vestige of a blush varied the sallow monotony of his complexion; the smile wreathed his curly lips as pleasantly as ever his party-colored eyes twinkled at Magdalen with the self-enjoying frankness of a naturally harmless man. Had his wife heard him? Magdalen looked over his shoulder to the corner of the room in which she was sitting behind him.
He had applied the art of French cookery to the rude material of the world, and refined and reduced all things into a sauce piquante all its realities were concentrated in essences; and, disdaining the grosser tastes of mankind, he lived upon the aroma of high life an epicure even among epicures; yet not an indolent enjoyer of the luxuries of his condition, but a keen, restless, and eager student of pleasurable sensations an Apicius, polished by the manners, and furnished with the arts of the most self-enjoying condition of mankind, that of an English gentleman of fortune in the 18th century.
From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror: The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment calleth itself "virtue."
And there is the affectation of the maternal passion with women who are never by any chance seen with their children, but who speak of them as if they were never out of their sight; the affectation of wifely adoration with women who are to be met about the world with every man of their acquaintance rather than with their lawful husbands; the affectation of asceticism in women who lead a thoroughly self-enjoying life from end to end; and the affectation of political fervor in those who would not give up a ball or a new dress to save Europe from universal revolution.
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