My kind of romance

"In a book of Alphonse Karr entitled Am Rauchen, there is a man who one evening follows a very elegant woman, with whom he had fallen in love at first sight on account of her beauty. Only to kiss her hand he feels that he had the strength to undertake anything, the will to conquer anything, the courage to achieve anything. He scarcely dares glance at the trim ankle which she shows as she holds her dress out of the mud. While he is dreaming of all that he would do to possess this woman, she stops at the corner of the street and asks if he will come home with her. He turns his head, crosses the street, and goes back sadly to his own house. 

... We men are built like that; and it is very fortunate that the imagination lends so much poetry to the senses, and that the desires of the body make thus much concession to the dreams of the soul. If any one had said to me, You shall have this woman to-night and be killed to-morrow, I would have accepted. If any one had said to me, You can be her lover for ten pounds, I would have refused. I would have cried like a child who sees the castle he has been dreaming about vanish away as he awakens from sleep."

Alexandre Dumas

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