The Lily Of The Valley / The Gallery Of Antiquities Quotes

“A new soul, a soul with rainbow wings, had burst its chrysalis. Descending from the azure wastes where I had long admired her, my star had come to me a woman, with undiminished lustre and purity. I loved, knowing not of love. How strange a thing, this first irruption of the keenest human emotion in the heart of man! I had seen pretty women in other places, but none had made the slightest impression upon me. Can there be an appointed hour, a conjunction of stars, a union of circumstances, a certain woman among all others to awaken an exclusive passion at the period of life when love includes the whole sex?”
― Honoré de Balzac, The Lily Of The Valley / The Gallery Of Antiquities: La Comedie Humaine of Honore de Balzac

“She was, as you know already without as yet knowing anything, the Lily of this valley, where she grew for heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her virtues. Love, infinite love, without other sustenance than vision, dimly seen, of which my soul was full, was there, expressed to me by that long ribbon of water flowing in the sunshine between the grass-green banks, by the lines of the poplars adorning with their mobile laces that vale of love, by the oak-woods coming down between the vineyards to the shore, which the river curved and rounded as it chose, and by those dim varying horizons as they fled confusedly away.”
― Honoré de Balzac, The Lily Of The Valley / The Gallery Of Antiquities: La Comedie Humaine of Honore de Balzac