Liber Amoris, Or, The New Pygmalion

A narrator who has left home recounts a consuming, unreciprocated passion that overwhelms his thought and behavior. Through intimate conversations, candid confessions, and a series of letters and fragments, he chronicles the escalation of obsession, jealousy, repeated attempts at persuasion and reconciliation, and frequent self-justification. Tender idealization alternates with quarrels, humiliation, and despair as the account moves between dramatic scenes and epistolary reflection. The tone is confessional and fragmentary, mapping psychological decline, remorse, and a compulsion to record feeling, while intermittently reflecting on memory, the illusions of love, and the personal cost of intense attachment.