In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

Ula gazed up, wringing her blood stained hands, and recited,
"Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if
one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the
strength of his stronger existence, for Beauty's nothing but the
beginning of Terror we're just able to bear, and why we adore it so is
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.”
"The Stendhal effect? People standing before Michelangelo's
David for the first time would faint, become ill, unable to bear the
beauty. And this one's beauty is so much more terrible!"
Penny ran her fingers over the bumpy chisel ridges. She could
agree with Rilke, but Stendhal? This statue was a piece of limestone
crystallized by metamorphism and no blood pulsed through those veins
and its face would never look over at her and smile. It was a piece of
art. Those nineteenth century aesthetes were deluded about so many
things. Michelangelo never fainted! He, like Beethoven, like Xenakis,
knew and had weathered far more abominable things. Could Beauty
make you sick? And, if so, what was the artist's responsibility? These
were the questions that had taken over her life; maybe this is what she
had come all this way for.
They drifted together in silence towards the exit, spiraling up
and out the top of the glass pyramid.
"Are you going back to the hotel now?" Ula asked without
looking up as she buttoned her cape and slipped on a quirky black
bonnet against the wind that had shifted, whipping blasts from the
north.
"Are you still at Dick's?" Penny asked, zipping up her parka but
not answering the question.
Ula looked to the river just beyond the Louvre's covered arches.
They couldn't see Dick's tall windows through the trees, but once on
the bridge they couldn't be missed.
"I haven't been back there yet. I don't think he got into the
Biennale so he'll be in a really pissy mood." She broke off with a shrug
and turned away without a word the black folds flapped and waved a
vicious goodbye as they receded towards the left bank.
Penny headed in the same direction but only after walking east
along the river to the Pont des Arts and walking across on the creaky
wooden planks towards the golden dome of l'Institut with the bells. She
took a wrong turn above the Boulevard St. Germain and ended walking
all the way up the Luxembourg Gardens to a fountain of the world held
aloft not by Atlas but by the continents anthropomorphized into
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