When I am about to enter the salon where we usually meet, my heart beats so violently that you can see it through my clothes and I am obliged to hold it back with both hands for fear it will escape me.--If I see my dream at the end of a path and in the park, the distance vanishes at once and I have no idea what becomes of the road: it must be that the devil takes me or that I have wings.--Nothing can distract my thoughts: if I read, her image comes between the book and my eyes;--I mount my horse, I gallop over the country, and it always seems to me that I feel its long hair mingling with mine in the wind, hear its hurried respiration, and feel its warm breath upon my cheek. The image possesses me and follows me everywhere, and I never see it more clearly than when it is not before my eyes.
You pitied me for not being in love--pity me now because I am in love; and above all because I love what I love. What a misfortune, what a crushing blow upon my already blasted life!--what an insensate, guilty, hateful passion has taken possession of me!--It is a shameful thing for which I shall never cease to blush. It is the most deplorable of all my aberrations, I cannot imagine it, I cannot understand it, everything within me is in confusion and bewilderment; I have no idea who I am nor who others are, I doubt whether I am a man or a woman, I have a horror of myself, I feel strange, inexplicable impulses, and there are moments when it seems to me that my reason is going, and when the idea of my existence abandons me altogether. For a long time I have been unable to believe in anything; I have listened to myself and watched myself closely. I have tried to disentangle the skein that has become entangled in my soul. At last, through all the veils in which it was enveloped, I have discovered the ghastly truth--Silvio, I love--Oh! no, I can never tell you--I love a man!