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The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in the depth of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached.
Alcée’s perception of Calixta’s lovemaking suggests that, until now, a transactional element has always been part of his sexual experience. Sex itself may have been more of a function than a passion—it gave him supposed ownership of his wife; it procured heirs for him and gave his plantation a mistress to organize and manage matters. Since Clarisse is glad to have time away from their “intimate conjugal life,” perhaps sex for her, too, was something of a duty. What occurs during the storm is a “revelation,” as the story calls it, for both lovers—sex that is free of obligation of any kind, a coupling of “generous abundance” with no other aim but mutual pleasure.
The rain was over, and the sun was turning the gleaming green world into a palace of gems. Calixta, on the gallery, watched Alcée ride away. He turned and smiled at her with a beaming face, and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughed aloud.
Alcée is a man transformed as he leaves Calixta’s house, relieved for a time of burdens, boyish again in a setting described as almost Edenic. The letter he writes to Clarisse, absolving her for at least another month of the duties of mistress of the plantation and of their marriage, is “loving” and “tender.” The intimacy he experienced with Calixta, far from bringing about guilt or remorse, seems to have freed something that had been bound in Alcée.
