It is hard to say how beautiful he was; and Aschenbach was distressed, as he had often been before, by the thought that words can but praise sensuous beauty, not match it.

He had not prepared for this precious spectacle; it came unhoped for. He had no time to entrench himself behind an expression of repose and dignity. Pleasure, surprise, admiration must have shown on his face as his eyes met those of the boy — and at this moment it happened that Tadzio smiled, smiled to him, eloquently, familiarly, charmingly, without concealment; and during the smile his lips slowly opened. It was the smile of Narcissus bent over the reflecting water, that deep, fascinated, magnetic smile with which he stretches out his arms to the image of his own beauty — a smile distorted ever so little, distorted at the hopelessness of his efforts to kiss the pure lips of the shadow. It was coquettish, inquisitive, and slightly tortured. It was infatuated, and infatuating.

He had received this smile, and he hurried away as though he bore a fatal gift. He was so shaken that he had to flee the light of the terrace and the front garden; he hastily hunted out the darkness of the park in the rear. Strangely indignant and tender admonitions wrung themselves out of him: “You dare not smile like that! Listen, no one dare smile like that to another!” He threw himself down on a bench; in a frenzy he breathed the night smell of the vegetation. And leaning back, his arms loose, overwhelmed, with shivers running through him, he whispered the fixed formula of desire — impossible in this case, absurd, abject, ridiculous, and yet holy, even in this case venerable: “I love you!”

— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice