“The Venus of Syracuse is a woman, and is also a symbol of fleshly lust…There are also women living whose eyes give us that dream of unrealizable and mysterious love. We seek to find in them something beyond what really exists, because they seem to embody something of the intangible ideal…In this way have poets forever been tortured by the thirst of a mystical love. The natural exaltation of a poetic soul, aggravated by artistic enthusiasm, impels these chosen ones to conceive of a sort of vaporous love, frantically tender, ecstatic, never satiated, sensual without being carnal, so delicate that a breath will cause it to vanish, unrealizable and superhuman. And these poets are, perhaps, the only men who never have really loved a woman, a real woman of flesh and blood, and with her womanly qualities and defects, her limited and charming mind, her feminine nerves, and her disquieting femininity…This marble figure, seen in Syracuse, is truly the human snare divined by the ancient artist, the woman who conceals and reveals the disquieting mystery of life…It is divine, not because it expresses a thought, but simply because it is beautiful.”

LA VIE ERRANTE by Guy De Maupassant