"PROFANE LOVE"

By Caravaggio

The
Book of Love

By

Prof. Dr. Paolo Mantegazza

Professor of Anthropology and General Pathology, Founder of the
first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in
Italy, Senator of the Kingdom of Italy

A translation of

The Physiology of Love

from the Italian text

American-Neo-latin Library
New York, N. Y.

PAOLO MANTEGAZZA, Italian physiologist and anthropologist, was born at Monza in 1831. He travelled extensively in Europe, India and America. He was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital and Professor of General Pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated Professor of Anthropology at the Istituto di Studii Superiori, Florence. He founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and the Italian Anthropological Society. He was deputy for Monza in the Italian Parliament from 1865 to 1876, subsequently being elected to the Senate. He is the author of many well known works, as "The Physiology of Sorrow," "The Physiology of Pleasure," "Elements of Hygiene," "Pictures of Human Nature," "Human Ecstasies," "Head," etc. His books are most popular in Europe, where they have been translated into almost every language and have reached an enormous circulation. Paolo Mantegazza ranks with the greatest European medical authorities and the most brilliant Italian writers.

Copyright, 1917, by
The American—Neo-latin Library

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Mantegazza is to Physiology what Flammarion is to Astronomy. The two great masters head a brilliant galaxy of modern writers on natural phenomena who draw their material from science and mould it in an esthetic form. After the most skilful analysis of the scientific elements to their minutest components, they proceed to an ideal synthesis in which the various elements retain their substance, yet change their outward appearance. It seems as if these elect minds, having once satisfied their scientific curiosity as to physical and human phenomena, had been fascinated and inspired by an irresistible love of creation, and rising above the facts and laws of nature to the evanescent and melodious world of imagination, they offer us their work in a harmonious unity of two seemingly opposite and irreconcilable elements—the real and the ideal, Science and Poetry.

And thus, I dare say, it is as if, by a generous law of reaction and equilibrium, while our generation seems to gravitate toward a life of facts and order, barren of idealism, Science would teach us that she herself does not benumb or kill sentiment, but, on the contrary, discloses to the minds of the elect the flowery slopes of an unknown and infinite world of wonders and sentiment.

So it must be that those who have attained a high place in intellectual life will gladly replace the old conception of physical and human phenomena with a new and more intense representation, which, measured in the finitude of our reason, is loved in the infinity of our sentiment. To the uninitiated mind most beautiful is the representation of the sun in the image of Phœbus crossing the heavens in his flaming chariot drawn by fiery horses; but still more beautiful for the intellectual mind is it to think of the immense body of fire, of the energy darting from a star more than a hundred million miles distant from our planet, more than a hundred million times larger than the earth, and yet a star millions of times smaller than millions of other celestial bodies to our naked eye unknown, unknown to our most powerful telescopes, and whose existence and fantastic speed in the space of the heavens are divined only by the abstraction of our faculties in an infinite representation of the laws of physics. Poetical is the vision of a goddess of Olympus descending to earth and carrying to a man asleep the message or the image of a dear, distant person; but immensely more poetical is the conception of a telepathic force within us, made of us, consciously or unconsciously created by us, an integral part of our psychical organism, and by which we instantly communicate over hills and dales, mountains and valleys, oceans and deserts, with another human being whose spirit is harmoniously attuned to ours.

The impersonation of hatred and love by Fury and Cupid is much less poetical than the conception of an explosion of psychical forces, powerful and antagonistic, in millions of men at the same time.

The task of dealing with the natural history, the origin and the development of the sentiment which underlies the principal phenomena of human existence, which came into being with the first twilight of organic life, and which indissolubly binds together the individuals and the generations, seems to have been reserved to the genius of Paolo Mantegazza, and with this great subject he dealt in a masterly way, in a way unimitated and inimitable. He has snatched Love from the Olympus of the gods of old, from the clutches of classic literature, stripped him of all his tinsel and garments, and revealed him as part—flesh and blood of man.

By a new conception of love, more rational, more human and yet no less poetical than the classic representations to which we have been accustomed from times immemorial, Mantegazza gives us a work in which the scientific foundation and the poetical conceptions are united in such wealth of colors and harmonies that its reading, rich with true and romantic charm, is incomparably superior to our best fiction. It is a daring deed, both in the literary and the philosophical field, and it opens a new horizon to the idealization of human feelings, discoveries and events.

Mantegazza, unlike countless love writers and poets, approaches his field not with a hoe or a plow to scratch the surface of the ground, but with a powerful drill that penetrates into the lowest strata of the earth and reveals its deepest terrestrial composition. In the pursuit of his aim, carried by enthusiasm in the innermost research of facts and by admiration for the beauty of his subject, Mantegazza has used all the wealth of his literary training, skilfully and lavishly drawing upon all the resources of the Italian language. The task of the translator has thus been made doubly difficult, as the original language of the book has more subtlety and artistic abandon than the English language would allow. Rather than run the risk of betraying either the substance or the representation of the author's idea, often it has been preferred to sacrifice the turn of the English phrase to that of the corresponding Italian, and possibly incur the imputation of exoticism.

Such is the translation of a beautiful Book of Love offered to the American public at a time when all the evil passions and degradations of hatred are unleashed over the world. In striking contrast with the trend of the human mind today, what a meager chance is awaiting the contemplation of a sentiment whose mission is to tie all humanity with a bond of affection! And yet, while time and evolution relegate the memory of the most fearful cataclysms of the human race to the icy page of history, the fundamental elements constituting human life cannot be changed or destroyed. Love will continue to exist as long as the laws of affinity and procreation seize the human being at his birth and by the evolution of matter dominate him even after his death. The struggle for life may become intensified or disappear from the world; hatred among classes, nations, races may deepen, expand or be altogether eliminated; passions may gain further ascendancy over humanity, or humanity may learn to control them; and, in the words of Shelley,

"Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change, to these

All things are subject but eternal Love."

At the feet of him, procreator and prince of all affections, at once proud, generous, kind, fair, and weak, avaricious, cruel, deceitful, in all virtues rich and in all sins, a king and a miser, we shall always lay, proudly or in shame, the innermost throbs of our heart, our tears and our joys, the highest aspirations of our mind, the sweetest ecstasies of our soul, our convulsions, our despairs, our crimes, up to the very threshold of the great oblivion, when, in the words of the poet, of the extenuated race one lone man and one woman, among the ruins of the mountains and of the dead woods, in the wake of the departing warmth, clasped together in the supreme fate of creation, livid, with glassy eyes shall see the last sun descend forever.

Er. Be.

TO THE READER

I have conceived love to be the most powerful and at the same time the least studied of human affections. Surrounded by a triple forest of prejudice, mystery and hypocrisy, civilized men know it too often only through stealth and shame. Poets, artists, philosophers, legislators, snatch a morsel now and then from the flesh of the great god, and hurry away to conceal it as a precious booty of forbidden fruit. To study love as a phenomenon of life, as a gigantic power which moulds itself in a thousand ways among various races and in various epochs, and as an element of health for the individual and for the generations, has appealed to me as a great and worthy undertaking.

The Author.

THE BOOK OF LOVE

". . . this precious jewel

Upon the which is every virtue founded."

—Dante.

INTRODUCTION GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE

Many years ago I wrote that to live means nutrition and generation, and the deeper I cast the sounding-line into the dark abysses of life, the more I am convinced that this definition faithfully depicts the most striking characteristics of all creatures which, from bacteria to man, come to life, grow and die on the face of our planet. If, however, I wished still further to simplify my idea, reducing life to its simplest and most essential form, I would say without fear of betraying the truth, that to live means to generate.

Every living body is perishable, but before dying it has the power of reproducing the form that has made it capable of living; and that whirlwind which absorbs and rejects, which assimilates new atoms and repels old ones, and which so clearly represents the eternal picture of life in all its manifestations, is also the most faithful representation of every form of generation.

Nutrition is a real genesis, and in the great chemical laboratory of living beings we have at all times before our eyes the reproduction of histological elements of organs and individuals. We lose hair, epithelia, white corpuscles every day; and yet every day we generate hair, epithelia and leucocytes: this is an every-day generation in the body of man. A nail falls off, a new one takes its place: this is the reproduction of an organ. We generate children similar to ourselves: this is the reproduction of an entire organism, the true generation. But in one of our offspring we see re-repeated a mole which is on our nose: this is the reproduction of an organ within an organism. On the other hand, one race generates another race, one species another species; and here we see a broader genesis by which from the reproduction of a cell through another cell we gradually pass to the generating of an organ, of an individual, of a race, of a species.

The world of living beings is a gigantic tree and from its trunk shoot forth the branches of classes, orders, species. On the branches leaves grow, which are the individuals; but each one of these small individuals generates within itself many cells, true organisms within greater ones. The world of living beings is but a great laboratory of prolific, incessant generation. Cells generate cells; organs, organs; species, species. An intimate brotherhood makes us members of one great organism—the placenta of living beings; and among ourselves we exchange the same matter which each of us in turn contributes to the work of apparent destruction, called nutrition, and to that of reproduction, designated as generation. To feed themselves and to generate, living beings are continually exchanging with each other a part of their own matter which, passing from one organism to another, seems to acquire new energy and new life. On the one hand, seaweeds live on mushrooms, carnivorous animals devour herbivorous, herbivorous feed on herbs, and man, the highest branch of the tree of living beings, partakes of all. On the other hand, males and females in continuous succession interchange part of their matter, remoulding their primitive forms.

The most elementary form of life is not, however, the cell, since at a lower stage we find the protoplasm, the true primum vivens which, by scission, generates the individual; and, by nourishing itself, nobody can tell what mysterious genesis of atoms it induces within its own most simple organism. The protoplasm cannot live without a continual exchange of matter, so that the live molecules of yesterday are dead today; and those which are alive today will be dead tomorrow; therefore nutrition also, in the last analysis, is an intimate and very mysterious generation.

Evanescence of forms is one of the most essential characteristics of living beings, and we give the name of death to the falling of every leaf from the tree of life. Man, also, drops some of these leaves every day—hair, epithelia, cells, which often produce a secretive substance and fall with it. Before dying, a part of the preëxisting form remains to re-animate the dead form and follows in its turn the parabolical cycle through which the mother form has passed. This is the most general principle and includes all possible kinds of generation, from that of scission to the highest form of sexual genesis. One would say that the life of an individual is only a moment of the great life of the species, of the classes, of the kingdoms of living beings; it is a spark which shoots off intermittently, passing from one organism to another.

Powerful and irresistible is the tendency to generate; in a great many cases the individual sacrifices himself consciously, or is unwittingly sacrificed by the laws of nature, provided that before death he transmit life to others. "Let the individual perish, if this preserve the species!" Such is the eternal cry of nature, which men and infusoria, oaks and mushrooms alike must obey. If the individual is protected and possesses preservative instincts and defensive organs, the species has a hundred bulwarks, a thousand manners of safeguard, more means of protection than are needed. In fact, living beings generate so profusely that one species alone would pervade the earth if the various circles of expansion, falling in with each other, did not struggle among themselves, like the circles caused on the smooth surface of a lake by a handful of sand thrown upon it by a child. Apart from the manner in which life is transmitted, there is an amount of life which passes away, there is a certain amount of fecundity, and this may seem, at first glance, most whimsical, while it is governed by the laws of preservation.

To be born and to die—fecundity and mortality—are so closely connected with each other that we can consider them as different aspects of the same phenomenon, as the action and reaction of life. When reproduction increases beyond measure, the dangers for the individuals generated increase at the same time, and destruction mows down the excessive number of those which are born. Now it is food that is no longer proportionate to the new-born; then parasites and enemies of the over-expanded species, which, increasing in turn, reëstablish the equilibrium. The destructive forces and the protective balance mutually, as happens with many other forces, simpler and better known.

The Malthusian problem, however, is much more intricate. If all species were equally prolific and had a life of equal length, the problem would, in fact, be reduced to a question of space and food; but, on the contrary, the duration of life and the various degrees of fecundity serve in turn to reëstablish the equilibrium by other ways. If the reproduction of mice were as slow as that of man, they would all be destroyed before another generation could be born; and even if they could live fifteen or sixteen years, not one of them, perhaps, would ever attain that age, surviving all dangers. And on the other hand, should oxen multiply in the same proportion as infusoria, the entire species would die of hunger in a week.

In order that an organic form be preserved, the individual must preserve itself and generate other individuals. Now these forces must vary inversely. If the individual, through its simple organization, is little fit to resist danger, it must countervail this weakness with reaction, generating intensely. If, on the contrary, high qualities give it a great capacity for self-protection, it should then diminish its fecundity proportionately. If danger is reckoned as a constant quantity, inasmuch as capacity for resistance should be equal in all species, and does consist of two factors (faculty to maintain individual life and power to multiply it), these factors cannot but vary in opposite directions. This most simple and sublime law, which Herbert Spencer read in the great book of nature, is one of those that rule with the most inflexible tyranny the elementary phenomena of reproduction, as well as the highest and most complex phenomena of human love.

In the Diatomaceæ the fecundity by scission is gigantic: Smith reckoned that a single gnat could create a thousand million individuals in one month. A young Gonium, capable of scission after twenty-four hours, can produce in a week 268,435,456 individuals equal to itself. In other cases, the process of multiplication is not scissiparous, but endogenous, as with the Volvox; but the reproduction is always extraordinary. If all the individuals generated should survive, a Paramecium would, by scission, produce in the course of a month 268,000,000 individuals. Another microscopic animal can produce 170,000,000,000 individuals in four days. The Gordius—the entozoön of an insect—lays 8,000,000 eggs in less than a day. An African termite lays 80,000 eggs in twenty-four hours, and Eschricht reckoned at 64,000,000 the number of eggs in the adult female of an Ascaris lumbricoides.

If, from the minute microscopic creatures exposed to every danger and which consume very little matter—if, from these living atoms of which you could gather as many in your hands as there are men on earth, you pass to the elephant, you have there a giant of flesh that requires thirty years of its life to become fecund, and then, after a long gestation, produces but one offspring. And above the elephant you find a giant of thought, Man, who requires the third part of his average life to reproduce himself, and after nine long months generates one child only; and, what is worse, he sees half of his offspring mowed down before they are able to bear flower and seed.

The methods of transmitting life are manifold, since nature in no other function has been so inexhaustibly rich with forms as in generation; but we, dealing here with the general physiology of love, will reduce all the various generative forms to these few:

Separation or Scission.—The individual dissevers into two parts, and each of these, made independent, reproduces the generator. This is the most simple form of genesis, in which the function of reproduction is not distinct from the other functions, but merges into them.

Endogenesis.—Within an individual many other individuals are formed; the parent opens, and, destroying its own individuality, dissolves in its offspring.

The individual by itself alone generates other individuals.—The parent generates through special organs and without dissolving in its offspring. The individuals generated and separated from the generator are eggs, seeds, perfect organisms; but in every case these are always elements evolved within the generator through special organs. The generative function is already marked and distinct in a laboratory which detaches and prepares some of the elements of the individual, so that they may reproduce it.

Monœcious Sexual Generation.—A step higher, the generative laboratory becomes complicated and divides into two parts, one of which brings forth the egg, the other the fecundating element. Each, for its own account, prepares the element destined for the reproduction of the individual; but if both do not come in contact, the new being is not generated. We have the sexes quite distinct, but enclosed within a single individual. Strange to observe, however, we behold an individual that generates an egg which cannot be fecundated by that individual's seed; or an individual that produces a seed which cannot be of any service to the egg. A duplex embrace of two hermaphrodites which interlace a quadruple love, and the appearance of winds, insects, or birds, as fecundatory paranymphs, resolves these problems of a most singular generation.

Diœcious Sexual Generation.—Finally, the generating organs, too, separate and fix themselves each upon a single individual, which is sterile in itself, produces but one of the generating elements, and, therefore, must combine with the other; and by such union they may produce the new creature: the sum of two individualities, the male and the female, the father and the mother. Man loves in twain; but although, like the other superior animals akin to him, he presents a diœcious sexual generation, yet in his inmost tissues he also possesses the endogenous genesis and the genesis by scission, and presents in this regard the remains also of the elementary forms of life enclosed within him.

In this rapid course through all the forms of generation we see delineated the same laws by which nature rules the other functions. Gradually new forces appear and new organs are brought forth to represent the subdivision of work. First, it is the whole individual that generates, then an organ of the individual, then again two organs in the same individual, and again two organs in separate individuals. In the many forms of genesis, the unity of the plan is more than ever manifest, and we, the highest of all living creatures, while, like the amœba, we have in our protoplasm and scattered all through the mass of our body the faculty to generate, recognize in man and woman the two distinct laboratories which prepare the seed and the human egg.

While the pathology of love, in many cases of lasciviousness, shows the last declining remains of a promiscuous hermaphroditism, imagination, a forerunner of science, causes us to divine that in more complex creatures sexes may be more than two, and generation presents a deeper subdivision of work, in the same manner as in the cynical or skeptical distinctions between platonic and sensual loves and in the most daring polygamies of soul and senses we perceive in the distance other lights which disclose to us the horizon of new and monstrous generative possibilities, some of them reaching the suprasensible and some as base and brutal as the most repelling atavic regressions.

When the science of the future will permit our posterity to connect all the phenomena of nature, from the most elementary to the most complex, from the simplest motion of a molecule to the flash of the most sublime genius, in an uninterrupted chain of facts, then perhaps the first origins of love will be sought in the elementary physics of dissimilar atoms which endeavor to find each other and combine, and with opposite motion generate the equilibrium. The positive electric body seeks the negative, the acid seeks the base, and in these conjunctions, with great development of light, heat and electricity, new bodies are formed, new equilibriums obtained; it seems that Nature renews her forces and, rejuvenescing, prepares herself for new combinations and new loves.

And is not love perhaps the combination of two dissimilar atoms which seek each other and combine, notwithstanding all the adverse forces of heaven and earth? And in the same manner as the molecule of potassium snatches the oxygen away from water with a great development of light and heat, is not the union of those two molecules, which we call man and woman, accompanied by a hurricane of passion, by flashes of genius, by infinite glittering of flames and ardor? Do we not perceive a pandemonium of physical and psychical forces accumulating, battling and equilibrating around that point where a man and a woman are attracted toward each other, to rejuvenate the human matter and rekindle the torch of life?

A particular motion, originated in the ovary and in the testis, accumulates such energy in the nervous centers as eventually to bring the masculine element in contact with the feminine, so that the generative gemmulæ produced in the slow laboratory of two different organisms reunite in that nest which is the maternal womb and where the fecundated egg must transform into a human being.

The poet and the metaphysician may define love in whatever manner they choose. There is only one definition for science: Love is the energy which must bring in contact the egg with the seed; without ovary and without testis there can be no love.

That forward movement which is called generation is so powerful as to oppose and even destroy the minor motion, that is, the preservation of the individual; and while each individual rotates, it is carried forward with a movement a hundred times more irresistible and powerful through space and time. The first motion represents the narrow life of the individual and is protected by egotism; the second is the great life of the species, and love defends it.

The most superficial study of the generative function is sufficient to convince us that love is always a phenomenon of high chemistry, in which the generating atoms, in order to combine, must be neither too similar nor too dissimilar. No sooner has sex manifested itself in animals than we have in the same individual, but in two distinct laboratories, the formation of two generative elements. Sex, which, at first thought, appears to us as one of the deepest mysteries of life, is nothing but a laboratory which attracts the elements generated by every element of the organism, and encloses and preserves them in itself in order to pour them into the bosom of other elements, similar but not equal, generated in another laboratory, that is, the opposite sex. When the two generative laboratories are separated in two distinct organisms, it is probable that the diversity of their gemmulæ is greater. If in individuals closely resembling each other, but of different races, we combine the generative elements, we still will probably have fecundity; while, if we pass to different species, fecundity will be more difficult; if we pass to different genera it will in most cases become impossible.

But let us set aside the words species and genera, which, in nature, have not the same value as we assign to them in our museums and in our books, and let us, instead, take from the world of the living a handful of animals, haphazard, so that we may gather together brothers, cousins, nephews, individuals of the same or affinitive classes, genera, orders, and let us place them in line, in the order of their degrees of similarity. Should we try to couple them, or study their spontaneous loves, we would find cases of sterility in beings too similar and in beings too dissimilar; therefore, generation moves between these two opposite poles, too great similarity and too great dissimilarity. That is the reason why we may see a woman with a mustache, atrophied breasts and deep voice remain sterile with a robust man: they do not generate because they have too close a resemblance. That is the reason why a dog and a cat are sterile: they do not generate, because they are too dissimilar. Nature said to living beings: "If you wish to love, be neither too similar nor too dissimilar."

Let us try and discover the reason of this law. Germs that are too similar cannot concur in fecundation, or fecundate unsatisfactorily, perhaps through the same laws of elementary physics and chemistry which cause bodies to repel other bodies equally electrified or with which they have too close a resemblance in their physico-chemical characteristics. Try the combination of sulphur with phosphorus, of iodine with bromine, and, on the other hand, observe the ardent loves of chlorine and hydrogen, of potassium and oxygen. The fecundity of two different organisms is, besides, an energy bearing in one direction; it is the sum of resistances all of them equal, while two quantities, different but susceptible of being summed, give a greater number of diverse resistances and have, therefore, a greater possibility of living and resisting external enemies. An individual is the sum of many victories over exterior elements, the result of many and infinite adaptations to the ambient which surrounds it. Two individuals dissimilar, but not enough to impede generation, will bring together those adaptations and those victories through which the new creature enjoys the possibility of resistance and will meet with fewer dangers.

It is much easier to explain why forms too dissimilar cannot love each other. This impossibility is one of the most powerful means of preserving the living forms, extremely varied, in those conditions which are useful to their existence. When a living being has come out of the struggles of life, when it has yielded to external agents and enemies in a certain way, it transmits itself to future generations in that form and nature which are the fruit of a long and successful battle. Precisely for the same reason, an herbivorous animal, which is the offspring of another that has gained its flesh with herbs, cannot grow and multiply except by feeding on herbs. Imagine for a moment that organs and tissues feeding on meat should be grafted on to the organs and tissues of an herbivorous animal. What disorders would not arise! A fragment of carnivorous animal closed up in an organism which has teeth to chew herbs, gastric juice to digest herbs, intestinal tube to assimilate herbs, and olfactory nerves which find leaves and flowers delectable! The apparent stability of the species, which in fact resolves itself in a slow mutation, is nothing therefore but the unavoidable necessity for male and female to pour into the crucible of generation elements that can combine, metals that can fuse, forming a homogeneous and compact alloy.

From the elementary physics of generation you may jump to the most ardent sympathies, to the juxtaposition of human characters in the nest of love, and you will see that the same law rules all and each of these facts. Neither too similar nor too dissimilar. Love is the sum of analogous but not identical forces; it is the complement of complements; it is the square of squares; it tolerates neither subtractions nor divisions.

We shall see at every step of our studies the same laws which govern generation, or the so-called physical love, re-appear in the high spheres of love. For us, love is simply one function which, to be understood, must not be barbarously mutilated and disrupted so as to have one part of its limbs sent to the laboratory of physiology, and the other left in the library of the philosopher. Love is such energy that from the lowest grades of the most automatic instinct it ascends to the highest regions of the suprasensible, and perhaps no other psychical element reaches to more distant poles.

Think of the shepherd of the high Apennines who loves a goat, and of Heine, who in the clutches of death wants to be brought to the Louvre to see the Venus of Milo once more, and you will have a pallid idea of the frontiers which this ardent, tenacious, violent, multiform passion called love seeks to conquer.

While in the field of chemical facts generation marks the highest point of molecular chemistry, in the psychological field love reaches the loftiest summits of the ideal. Love is the force of forces; it makes its appearance when man is strongest; it vanishes when age has weakened him. Love is the joy of joys, it is at the bottom of every desire, of all riches, on every horizon of pleasure; it is always the highest aim. If we except men who were born without gentle feelings, in every human sky love is the brightest star; it is the sun of every firmament. It is the strongest, the most human, the richest of passions.

In all forms of generation, whether agamous or sexual, by scission or by endogenesis, whether we consider the son in comparison with the father, or with far Adam, we behold the generated preserve a part of the last or of the first generator, so that the motion communicated from the first to the last generation is transmitted without interruption. Take as the starting-point the Adam of the Bible or the Adam of progressive evolution, the clay breathed into by a God or the Darwinian ascidia: each one of us has still within himself a material part belonging to the first man or first father of all men, so that an immense brotherhood unites all living beings. To the divination of the poet who, beholding the flowery meadows, the forests, the swarming of animals, cries out with emotion: "O Mother Nature!" science answers in accord, as it contemplates a quantity of matter and a quantity of life pass from one to the other of those organisms called individuals. For every life extinguished a new life is born, and within us, who occupy the loftiest place among all the living beings on this planet, quiver and vibrate the molecules which have passed through thousands and thousands of existences and thousands and thousands of loves.

If love is the warmest and the most human of passions, it is also the richest. To its altar every faculty of the mind carries its tributes, every throb of the heart carries its fire. Every vice and every virtue, every shame and every heroism, every martyrdom and every lewdness, every flower and every fruit, every balm and every poison may be brought to the temple of love. Everything human can be carried away in the whirlwind of love; and more than once man regrets that he possesses but one life to offer as a holocaust to this god. And yet this gigantic force is the least governed of all the passions. It would seem that before it man feels too small and too weak; and just as the savage falls on his knees before the lightning and weeps, or flees, the civilized man, even today, is terrified before the unexplored hurricane of this sovereign force, and acknowledges his powerlessness and his ignorance. In the delirium of voluptuousness and in the storm of desperation, he lets himself be carried away by a force which he considers superior to reason, too powerful in comparison with his weakness. In his codes he writes, timidly, laws which he violates every day; opprobrious punishments which the juries always cancel; and a dense fog of ignorance surrounds the temple of love, which he enters nearly always as a thief and from which he emerges nearly always as an outcast. Our legislation on love is a wretched connubiality of hypocrisy and lechery, and as we know not how to look love in the face, we disguise it with the garments of the buffoon and the prostitute. Our laws are so perfect that many must not love, and very many cannot love; and while we all weep over the few victims of hunger, we shrug our shoulders at the hundreds of thousands who die in celibacy for not having been able to gather the straw for their nests, and we laugh at the millions of celibates who know nothing of love save masturbation and prostitution. In the presence of love we are still more or less savage—the basest brutishness before the most powerful of human forces!

Yet love also should be conquered like all other forces of nature; and without losing a fraction of its energy, or a flower of its garden, it also must be governed by science, which understands and directs all things. The lightning which prostrates the savage in the dust of fear is guided by us on the small wire of the conductor, gilds the ornaments of our women and transmits our thoughts from one hemisphere to the other. This other lightning, also, which, more powerful and more dangerous, explodes in the hurricanes of the human heart, must be studied, guided and reduced to a live force that can be measured, weighed and governed. Love should be the dearest, the most precious, the most powerful of civilized forces. No other passion can claim supremacy where it appears; no other can solve the sublime problem of combining the greatest voluptuousness with the greatest virtue, of generating the good of future beings through the joy of the living ones, of transmitting civilization to posterity in the spasm of an embrace.

LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS

CHAPTER I LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Arcadians, metaphysicians, and all adorers of the past are cursing every day and every hour the modern mania of comparing human things to living beings and call for anathemas against this absurd and sacrilegious profanation of the man-God. Comparative anatomy, physiology and psychology are for these gentlemen nothing but different forms of a strange aberration of the human mind; something capricious and morbid which, by the continual comparison of man and beast, brutalizes us, prostitutes us, and sends us back with a new insanity to the bestial Olympus of men with animal members and of human grafts set on the flesh of the son of God. According to those most exalted and supercilious gentlemen, these are psychic maladies not to be discussed, but cured by contempt and ridicule; they are the hysterics of thought, which disappear with the generation that has seen them rise from the corrupt entrails of the human family. But man does not lower himself by comparing himself with beings that are the matrix from which he came; he does not degrade himself by scenting the earth from which you, also you, O super-gentlemen, say we have been moulded and which is ever the frame supporting us.

The true metaphysics, if this word has still any meaning, was created by modern science, which, by the boldest comparisons of the simplest things with the most complex, of the smallest with the greatest, extracts the subtile from the subtile, and under the motley appearance of the form reveals the only law that governs them. We are going to seek in the limbus of living beings the crepuscules of the highest human things. Bowing our head modestly before the simplicity of laws which govern and control such a wealth of forms, let us return to the reality of things, feeling neither dejected nor ashamed of ourselves, but satisfied with having known how to read the notes of harmony written in the world of dwarfs and giants. Our pride will find sufficient satisfaction, after so many comparisons, in realizing that we are first among all living beings.

No spectacle of nature is more splendid, more admirable than that of the loves of plants and of animals. Nature could not write more fascinating music with a less number of notes, and no other phenomenon of life can resemble that of generation in profusion of forms, lavishness of artifices, inexhaustible conception of mechanisms. One would say that where the reproductive gemmulæ are attracted, where life reconcentrates its best part to renovate itself with a new impetus, there new and strange energies are developed, and the forces of nature appear with the most gigantic pomp, the most gorgeous luxury. In every other function, Nature, like an economical housewife, seeks the useful and often is satisfied with the necessary; she simplifies the mechanisms, removes the attritions and through the simplest ways attains her aim. But she is not content with the good and the true for generation, and, surrounding the nest of love with a large profusion of esthetic elements, she exhausts every resource to prepare a feast for the life which renews itself. It is around the flower that, nearly always, the most exquisite beauty of form, the most inebriating seductions of perfume, the most varied tints of the painter's palette are interwoven. How many treasures of esthetic force in a lily and in a rose! And all that luxury to do honor to the love of a day, the love of an hour; and all the splendor of a nuptial robe, a thousand times more beautiful than human industry could produce, to screen the virginal kiss of an anther and a pistil!

And jumping from the lily and the rose to the summits of the animal world, how many splendors of fancy, how many flashes of passion, what an interlacement of elements, to make a garland for the kiss of a man and a woman. Run, fly, on a spring day, among the blossoming beds of a garden, among the thousand amorous corollas of the flowers; shake the severe boughs of the cypress and of the pine; plunge your feet into the soft, wet carpet of vallisnerias; let your eyes penetrate into the humid recesses of the barks and the mossy labyrinths of the granite; and everywhere a warm circumfusion of pollen, spores and antheridia will tell your flaming heart that in the world of plants, among the perfumes of the corollas and the emeralds of the seaweeds, love exists in a thousand ways, and the atmosphere is all pervaded with the warm, inebriating sparks which, on the wings of the winds and of the insects and in the rays of the sun, diffuse everywhere an amorous, voluptuous wave.

The love of flowers is mute in the soft perfume of their corollas, but in many of them silence does not prevent tender blandishments and fervent embraces; many plants, always immovable, have convulsions in their flowers; always cold, they flame up in the calyx of their loves. Often they love only once a year; but what a profusion of embraces, what a fecundity of pollen and seed! Shake with your hand a single branch of the juniper or of the blossoming pine, and you will immediately see the air darken with a cloud of fruitful dust; entire forests love at one time, and for miles and miles they fill the air with voluptuous murmurs; more than once do the winds carry clouds of pollen, and the wanton rain washes and purifies the atmosphere, and tinges itself all with the amorous dust.

And without jealousy or rancors, in the shade of the blossoming pines, and among the stamens of the enamored flowers, in every clod of grass, in every cavern of mountain, in every fissure of rock, in every bed of seaweeds, in the deep waves of the ocean, and in the drops of water oozing from the glaciers, in the somberest darkness of mines and in the infinite sky, the animals interweave their loves; so that in every part of the globe, and in every hour of the day and of the night, every ray of the sun warms and contemplates millions of embraces, while every ray of the moon guides the nocturnal lovers to a thousand more intimate blandishments. If it is true that a leaf falls from the tree of life every second and dies, then at every moment a new gemma is born, and for every gemma how many embraces, for every new-born how many loves! The flowers planted in the ground of a cemetery appeal to me as the noblest form of the cult of the dead; for, if our planet is a vast cemetery, where every atom of time buries an atom that was living once, this earth is all a nest of love, in which every zephyr carries to our ear a sigh of voluptuousness, and the harmony of the ether, a dream of the ancient poets, is nothing, perhaps, but the sum of all the kisses exchanged among the living creatures.

If the anatomist and the physiologist discover in the study of generation in the various animals some precious materials to mark the highest laws of the morphology of the living beings, the psychologist finds in the loves of brutes sketched nearly all the elements that man has gathered under his robust wings. No function is more adapted than love to contemplate the unique type and the infinite legion of its forms, to admire a unique conception developed in a thousand different tongues.

No sooner has sex made its appearance than the male quickly distinguishes himself by his aggressive character. With few exceptions, it is the male that seeks, conquers, keeps the prey. Glance over the pages of Darwin's work on sexual selection and you will see how many weapons nature has given to males to conquer and keep their mates. Even in plants, it is the pollen that goes in search of the ovulum, the ovulum that awaits the spark that is to fecundate it. In the most simple of animal forms, where the male and female live and die fettered to the spot that saw their birth, it is the virile element that is always carried there, where the germ awaits it. This is the first dogma that governs the religion of love in the entire world of the living; and when all high races look with contempt upon the woman who attacks and the man who flees, they only protest against the violation of one of the most tyrannical laws which men and mollusks, women and pistils, cannot evade.

Man summarizes all the forms of the living nature; so that we are frequently tempted to affirm that whatever of human is in him is the greatest synthesis of all the minor forms of the living, and that he is precisely the first because under the bark of his individuality all the forces are gathered within him, from the secondary to the last; and the same phenomenon we observe in the psychical elements of his loves.

Pigeons, even when intermingled with the most varied breeds, are seldom unfaithful to their mates; and although the male, in a rare whim, may break the vow of fidelity, he quickly returns to the dear nuptial bed of his spouse. Darwin kept some pigeons of different breeds shut up in the same place for a long time, and there was never a bastard among them. Do we not also find among men splendid examples of the most faithful monogamy and do you not recognize it as the social basis in almost all the superior races?

The antelope of South Africa has up to a dozen mates, and the Antilope saiga of Asia more than a hundred. But have we not the small and hypocritical polygamies of modern society, and those, most splendid and impudent, of the Orientals? Have we not in man, as in very many animals, females who submit to love as to a duty, and males on whom love must be imposed? Have we not libertinism at the very side of chastity? Have we not in the world of man all the lasciviousness, all the ardors, all the possibilities of lewdness of the animals' world?

Several fulmineous forms of love which last no longer than the flash of the lightning not infrequently occur among men, as the cold, long-lasting kisses of many insects are an amorous practice of various human temperaments. And fiery, cruel jealousies and bloody battles are scenes common to men and brutes; nor is death for love an exclusive privilege of man. The few and coarse passions of animals are all carried as a holocaust to the altar of generation, while man carries to it all the ardors of his rich nature, all the infinite forces which he has drawn from the great womb of the living beings and which he has centuplicated with the accumulations of his hundred civilizations. The chaffinch, in the contests of amorous song, more than once falls from the tree on which he is singing his erotic hymn, smothered by pulmonary apoplexy; just as many a poet beholds the lyre of his genius and the chords of his life break at the feet of a woman. In the silence of the shady thickets, the nightingale, exhausted, swoons with love and fatigue, and dies for having been unable to vanquish a more fortunate rival in melody and strength of notes; and hundreds and hundreds of times, in the somber labyrinths of life, the human lover dies in the battles of an unhappy love, and he too dies because he could not sing louder and sweeter than his rival. Nor is coquetry peculiar to the human female only; no woman in the world will ever be the equal of a female canary in the wicked art with which she resists the impatient ardors of her companion; and the thousand travesties with which in the feminine world a "yes" is concealed under a "no" are but pallid imitations of the refined coquetry, the simulated flights, the amorous bitings and the hundred thousand cajoleries of the world of animals.

As to the esthetic elements which nature has lavished upon the loves of living beings, they are such and so many that the richest palette would be insufficient to depict them or the poet's words to describe them. Here are two pictures from my meager collection.

I

I am in the garden, lying down upon a wall so low that I can voluptuously scent the soft aroma of the earth damped by a storm; I have no rugs under my body or pillows under my head; a slate, furrowed and shining, is my bed. With one hand extended above the wall, I am nipping the petals of a lemon flower, while with the other I am frightening the ants which hustle about in the sandy path. All at once, two little shadows, two brown sprites, pass before my eyes and alight, facing me, in the middle of the path. They are two children of heaven, all wings and all beauty; the organs of terrestrial life are reduced to a thread, but a thread that sucks the nectar from the flowers, and four gigantic wings to conquer the skies. Their hours are numbered; they must love and die, and nature made them warm and swift for intense love: organs of sense greater than the venter, organs of beauty greater than the entrails. They are butterflies, but I know not their names, and I feel disappointed. I look around in vain for an entomologist to name them for me: man does not feel that he possesses a creature unless he has sprinkled it with the ink of his dictionaries. They will die, as far as I am concerned, nameless; and in vain will they knock at the gates of paradise, to enter the place where dear and beloved things are remembered. Can you imagine ever having loved a woman whose name you know not? As in religion, so it is in love: baptism is the first and holiest of sacraments.

But these butterflies love each other without baptism; they are frolicking on the pebbles of the path, and running after each other. They do not suspect that the greatest tiger of our planet is watching them, and that a great lizard is creeping down slowly from the little wall and turns its head to left and right sullenly, licking its own lips with its forked tongue and anticipating the savory taste of the delicate flesh of those pretty creatures. They are too happy to think of enemies that surround them; and life and love are flowers which are picked in the midst of hurricanes and battles. They have found a stalk of withered grass which, under the footsteps of many pedestrians and in the sand strewn by the gardener, has succeeded in living and blossoming. That microscopic bush is an entire world for those two lovers, and the little female resorts to it as to a defense against her sweet assailant and runs around it like a child who flees from blows by running around a table. But, after a few impatient circumvolutions, the lover jumps over that little tree and with his wings shakes those of his companion. A pinch of golden dust spreads through the air, and a slightly spiteful shrug, a rebuff and a voluptuous quiver close that first scene of love. At times the little female seems about to yield to the impatient embraces of her companion; and when he, with the trepid anxiety of him who is about to grasp happiness, is very close to her and on the point of touching with his pubescent and loving antennæ the velvety body of his beloved one, she flies two yards away, and he after her and again and again is met with mockery and cajoleries. The heat increases and the surcharged desire has become as ardent as the sun. The coquette has turned her back to her pursuer and opens her wings slowly in order to show the splendor of her gems, her silver, her velvet, in all their pomp; and having shown them, she folds and raises her wings and instantly hides all the most splendid dress with which nature has made her so beautiful. Nor is the male less of a seducer, as with a little bound, which resembles a flight, he places himself in front of his companion, and in turn opens his wings, showing his thousand colors and the charm of his golden eyes. But too restless is the impatience of those two lovers who exchange their first kisses. Whoever has witnessed but once the caresses of two butterflies can certainly imagine how the angels love; but does any planet shelter a human creature that lives with wings also in heaven?

Now those two butterflies come near to each other, so near as to touch, to kiss with their antennæ; then in a wink one bounds upon the other and with a leisurely, sweet, prolonged caress, fondly they kiss each other with their wings. And then they repose, as though they wished to relish the sweetness of that grand and voluptuous caress, in which the wing of the one softly and slowly kisses the silk and velvet of his companion. How sweet, how sensual must be the caress of two wings which with a thousand scintillating papillæ touch each other in a perfect juxtaposition, and yet in this intermingling of nerves and velvet do not lose one single speck of that golden dust which adorns them!

Many and many a time I saw those happy creatures prance around and kiss each other; many a time I stood with beaming eye, envying that angelic kiss of two wings. Man may, indeed, envy the butterfly which in its rich loves of glittering inspiration puts to shame our corporeal embraces. Two creatures, nude yet clothed, passionate and chaste, that love but once and one creature only, that kiss on earth and unite in the skies; that, inebriated with the nectar of flowers and the rays of the sun, caress each other with their wings and fall in love with such beautiful hues as Titian and Rubens strove in vain to obtain from their art and their chemistry; two creatures that abandon life in a long love and from the spasms of a leisurely embrace return to nature their bodies extinguished by love!

After long kisses and many caresses, my two angels exchanged a last, more ardent rebuff, and then away in the sky to relight the torch of life which was soon to be extinguished in them. Sighing, I followed them, now united in a whirling flight, until they were lost in the azure of the skies. Why do we not also love in that way?

II

On my neighbor's roof the first rays of the sun have stirred up an infernal racket. Among the tiles, tawny and corroded by the black wartwort, there are some soft cushions of moss, and on the eaves, with edges frayed by rust and twisted by the alternating of sun and ice, grows some grass that, more frugal than an anchoret and happier than a king, lives on light and dew. On those tiles and on those eaves all the sparrows in the neighborhood have their rendezvous; and, sprightly, petulant, noisy, they pursue each other, intermingle with their wings, and clash, peck, play with their little feathered bodies. They speak a common and inharmonious language, but they seem to narrate the dreams of the night, and to have many and important things to tell each other. One shrieks, another warbles, a third is chirping; not one is still. Happy because they have slept well, having already forgotten yesterday, and unmindful of today, they are basking their feathers in the first rays of the sun, and, beaks hidden under their wings, waging war upon some importunate acarus. There are some small and some big. The gray, the coppery, and the black with slight variations of hues indicate, perhaps, to the naturalist age and sex, perhaps even varieties of species; but in this moment they are all kindred chattering and enjoying themselves together. No difference of caste seems to humiliate one and elate another; no infirmity produces pain in some of them and compassion in others; here is neither etiquette of rank nor hypocrisy of compliments. Have they, those dear and happy young sparrows, carried into effect the republic of Plato?

But, lo! in that crowd of thoughtless, happy creatures I behold a sparrow of a deeper black, a darker chestnut hue, and more high-chested than the others. Frequently he stands upright on his small legs, stretches his neck, his body, his head, like a child about to have his height measured, and, without moving from his place, he looks to the right and to the left with an air of indefinable, vain complacency. And, lo! among his neighbors he sees a female sparrow, of a plain gray color, with an elongated body, delicate and pretty. She seems to have been made for the ivory hand of a lady to hold, thrusting out her loving head from that nest of intelligent folds that is the hand of a woman. The impudent sparrow sees her and, without approaching, utters a cry of conquest which in force and petulance already seems to be a cry of victory. It appears to me that in the sparrow's dictionary that sound must be a word with great significance and important consequences, because the pretty little female with a short flight leaves the noisy crowd of her companions and draws near to the edge of the roof. But the bold lover impatiently flies after her and repeatedly renews his insistent, petulant cry; he is already very close to her, but the little female flies to the roof of the house on the opposite side of the street. She has hardly reached it when the male overtakes her, and at short distance they both face and defy each other; and, twittering in different voices, they hurl at each other a world of words which seem to me insolence and tenderness at the same time. The one whines, the other shrills; the one implores, the other commands, and frequently the prating is so closely intermingled that it seems like the sound of one instrument. But the bickering appears to have fatigued them, and the pretty little female withdraws, running to an eave, while the male looks up at the sun and awaits new strength. And strength seems to be restored to him very soon, for the warbling and shrieking begin anew. Nor is the insolent lover satisfied with his voice, but runs by leaps and flights to peck his companion; and a hasty retreat, a confused crying, a continual clashing succeed each other at brief intervals through the mossy labyrinths of that roof. Already many battles have been fought between the two lovers; the anxiety to escape and to defend herself from wanton desires seems so sincere in that winged little female that I almost begin to believe that she does not want to be loved that morning. But, if this be really so, why does she not open her wings and fly away into the infinite sky? And if she does not love that too obstinate persecutor, why does she call him when he, piqued, flies to the top of the roof, almost simulating indifference or vexation? But desire cannot stand that war any longer, and the male is now decided to seize the sweet prize of victory, and as if sliding down on those tiles, with short leaps that seem steps he pursues his companion, who withdraws to a corner of the roof where it projects over the street. Behind her she has not an inch of space left: she must either fly away and lose, perhaps, her lover, already tired of so many refusals, or capitulate. Fractions of an inch seem to have become infinite space, measured as they are by male and female with steps and leaps; and the female raises her voice louder and louder at intervals, but does not succeed in drowning the more robust and courageous voice of the lover who is now so close to her as to touch her with his beak and shake her with his wings. The two little warm bodies come into contact, clash, commingle. There, on the extreme brink of the eave, with her little body suspended over the abyss, the female concedes the crowning voluptuousness to her companion, and a sweet inspiration and a rebuff which seems like a flash of lightning attend an ardent, intimate, fulmineous love, a love caught over the abyss of space.

The two lovers fall in a swoon; they rise slowly and stare at each other, amazed and languid; then, with a shiver, they adjust their feathers, disarranged by the embrace; with a second shiver they absorb slowly, slowly the last quaver of the vanishing voluptuousness, and away they fly to hide in some hospitable tree their happy lassitude and to restore their strength for new battles and new loves.

These two pictures, which I have rapidly sketched from nature, are only poor specimens from an immense collection, rich in the warmest tints and in the most singular designs. In no function does life multiply its forces as in love, and the queerest phenomena are interlaced around the union of the sexes, which, unique in essence, assumes the most varied forms. The philosopher, the poet, the artist, should study with interest the thousand ways in which living beings exchange the germinative gemmulæ, and they would find subjects for profound meditation and a strong incentive to inspiration. Only in the eyes of the hypocrite or of the idiot many loves of living beings may seem brutal battles or lascivious embraces. Nowhere does Nature manifest herself more powerful, more inexhaustible, more admirable than where she teaches the living how to perpetuate life. It is well to conceal, as far as possible, from the eyes of our children, especially from little girls, the too obscene intercourses of those domestic animals which most resemble us. However, the most rigorous morals in the world and the most puritanical modesty would be unable to hide the kisses of doves, the amorous duets of canaries, the sublime embraces of butterflies. More than one maiden had in these pictures of nature her first lesson of love; and many years before the lips of a lover taught her the life in two, doves, canaries, butterflies had caused her heart to throb, disclosing to her a corner in the realm of infinite and glowing mysteries.

CHAPTER II MORNING CREPUSCULES OF LOVE—THE GOOD AND EVIL SOURCES OF LOVE

A human being of a low order or of a simple nature does not feel the energy of that new sentiment called love rise within him until the development of the germinative glands has marked in him the character of the sex and made of that being a man or a woman. On the other hand, in rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has impressed its deep mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious and chaste sympathy attracts the young boy toward the young girl. There, where the sun of the infinite azure of the skies is to rise, one notices a rosy tint lightly projected on the horizon, but sufficient to warn us: "There must the greatest star shine some day, the father of all light." The sun is ever the most beautiful among all the beautiful things of the skies, and I have studied with warm and constant affection, watched with religious attention the first crepuscules of that other sun which we are now studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the precocious corruption of books and of neighbors, they rise spontaneously in the heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like serene and calm rays of a light that later will be ardent and fascinating. They appear and disappear, like flashes of lightning, flashes which noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave them darker than before. A vulgar and coarse malignity repeats a blasphemy every day when it asserts that no child is ignorant of the secrets of love. The innocence of childhood is truer, more sincere and deeper than is supposed, and lasts limpid and adamantine even when it has been splashed with the mud of social corruption. The rosy lips of a child may repeat, with an expression of lascivious malice, a jest learned by chance from a maid-servant or from a libertine, but that stain does not penetrate into the crystalline nature of the child, and the spray of a fountain will be sufficient to wash the trace away. The malignant rabble is wont to doubt of the innocence of others, just as the wicked is to deny all virtue.

In the infantile songs, in the noisy and turbulent games which form the delight of the first age, suddenly a young boy beholds a little girl among a hundred, among a thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy ties the rosy knot of a nameless affection, of an innocent, unwitting love, which may seem at the same time the caricature and the miniature of a sublime picture. I remember having seen an angelic little girl, blonde as an ear of wheat and rosy as the aurora, throw her arms around the neck of a little boy as haughty as a brigand and as dark as a pirate. And the impudent little thing would cover him with kisses, and he would disdain and resent these cajoleries; and she would tell him that she loved him very much, that she wanted to make of him her little bridegroom. A reversed world, a microscopic scene of a chaste Joseph who did not know what woman was, and a Lilliputian woman who, in the innocent ardors of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar and was nothing but an angel. However, this sudden movement of affection between two children of different sex conceals sometimes a true and real passion which has haughty jealousies, tears and sighs, delirious joys, a history, a future.

The beautiful young girls whom a kind or a cruel nature has destined to arouse at every step of life a desire or a sigh, often ignore the fact that in the multitude of their adorers there are boys so small as to seem babies and who kiss in secret the flowers that have fallen from their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic thieves, steal into the little room that shelters their angel to kiss her bed, to kneel on the carpet which that woman treads—that woman whom they already distinguish above all the creatures in the world, whom they dare already to place on the same level as their mother. And how often a woman who playfully runs her fingers through the locks of a boy laying his head upon her knees, is unconscious of a little heart that beats loudly, loudly, under those caresses; unconscious, when the child raises his curly head, of the cause of his flush, which does not come from congestion, but from burning with a fire of which he himself is ignorant, but which is love.

These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most beautiful hours of our child-life, seem to last only as long as the morning twilight; and certainly the battles of youth often cause them to be forgotten. And many, with slippery memories and skeptical hearts, when they hear them mentioned have only words of contempt and gestures of pity for what they are pleased to term infantile lullabies to be relegated among the horrors of the witches and the caresses of the nurse. And yet how often these fleeting phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a deeply enamored nature and weave the first threads of a long fabric of delirious joys and torments! Some very, very fortunate mortal, on his death-bed, could press the hand of the only woman he had ever loved, whom he had loved when still a child, before he even knew she was a woman. The trembling lips of the dying man could link the last kiss of life with the first noisy, insolent, clumsy kiss on the soft cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And without trying to reach this loftiest sphere of an ideal too far removed from our existence, how often, after a long life hardened by the tortures of a hundred passions, after having lost faith and love, in the dusk of the early evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakened a dear memory, buried many years since, and the heart of an old man throbbed and a tear ran down his wrinkled face! Before the weary eyes a little straw hat had passed, with two blue streamers, but in the depths of the heart what an abyss of dear memories had opened in an instant! In the night of the past, a limpid ray of light had illumined a picture all life and all beauty; an antique cameo had appeared under the pick of the gravedigger, among ruins and dust! And that picture was a childish love, a flower carried away by the turbid torrent of a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which, after all, is not always ungrateful or cruel.

If you ask a boy why he loves a little girl, he will blush and run away; if you ask the little girl, her face will flush and she will answer with a sublime impertinence. They love—and they know not why! Ask a precocious rosebud why it wanted to bloom in March, instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous air of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it had made its nest. They love, and they know not why! In passionate men the first light of love appears sooner, because Nature, fruitful and impatient, longs to give her flowers, and an entire life will be for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes them. They love soon because they love much; as men of genius, at ten years of age, often conceive that which the masses will never conceive at thirty.

And why, my boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, my pretty girl, do you allow yourself to be kissed only by the lips of that dark, impertinent little beau? Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark lad is unlike any other boy. Love, from its first and most indistinct appearance, is selection, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition of discomposed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of dissociated things; the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most prepotent of the affinities ties of attraction!

Aside from the precursory crepuscules of natures most powerful in love, this sentiment, in ordinary men, rises when a new want springs forth under the rod of that magical transformer which is puberty. At that time, on the smooth, pubescent, roundish surface of the infantile nature, a deep crevice opens; a void is formed which woman alone can fill; then, that little, round, smooth fruit called little girl also sheds its childish skin, disclosing the juicy and delicate flesh of the fruit which was hidden in it. Then, from every developed muscle of the virile organism, from every sound of its strengthened voice, from every hair that makes its skin hirsute, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the loudest tone: A woman! And from every flexuous limb of the girl who has become a woman, from every quiver of the hair which makes her proud, from every pore of the young girl who has become a crater of burning desires, arises a cry which demands: A man!

The passage of the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is one of the epochs most burdened with anxieties, most merry with convulsive joys, and for this I call it the hysterical period of life. I shall illustrate it, perhaps, some day, in a work which I am preparing on the ages of man. I shall here describe with few, wide strokes of the pen how the necessity of loving makes itself felt to most men. And if I have referred to woman most of the time, it is because she, more chaste, more reserved, and yet a hundred times more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the appearance of the new god; more innocent than we are, she does not know his nature; more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature conceded to man common resources almost unknown to woman, and only too often precocious vice makes him acquainted sooner with voluptuousness than with love. When he is chaste, virtuous and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult, which stirs his soul; he too, somber, melancholy, frantic, demands of nature, with the accents of wrath and plaintive lamentations: A woman!

To this cry answers, alas! only too often, the first comer. It is impossible for certain natures to resist a long time the tortures of robust and vigorous chastity: the frail human shell would fall to pieces if it persisted in keeping imprisoned an accumulation of forces, all gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. The first love is not slow to appear; and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon lacks more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, Love is such a magician that he can create them and transform a worm into a god.

The maiden in her dreams, by looking at the pictures in the church and within the domestic walls, had fancied a winged man with nothing earthly and material but two lips to kiss. The object desired by her was an angel, all love and all ether, who would gather under his large folded wings the soul of the young girl and carry it away, through the space of heaven, to a golden region, all light and warmth. The quivering of the wings and the velvet of a kiss were all the voluptuousness which the chaste virgin ever thought of dreaming; and beyond it, an obscure and infinite mystery of which she knew neither name, nor confines, nor form. And instead of this angel, she beholds a man in trousers, with mustaches, who smokes much and slanders women; perhaps his hair is already turning gray, already he may be a husband and a father—but he is a man.

And the youth, too, had dreamed of his angel. She should have been all eyes, all locks of hair; divinely slender, with feet which would hardly touch the earth, eternal smile wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul ardent as fire and an innocence as pure as the snow that falls upon the summits of the Jungfrau. And, instead, she who wakes us from the dream of the night is the provocative, stout maid-servant who by her contours only, distinct and strong as they are, shows nothing but that she is much of a woman, and instead of wings she has two sinewy arms and two hands hardened from the use of pot and broom; and, far from having winged feet, she pounds the floor with pattens that seem to be soled with iron—but she is a woman.

Anything is good and enough for a first love, which is nearly always a million of hunger and a penny of bread. How vulgar is the object of that enamored young girl's thoughts! The heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and the hebetude of his stare seems sentimental languor to her; he is ill, and to her his illness appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant, but to her he is passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will love but her, who alone will know how to make him happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has launched to the skies, when he sang the exciting form of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he not wept, thinking of the bluish paleness of a cholerotic working-woman! Woe, if seduction accompanies all this texture of lies with which too often the first love builds its nest! Woe, if to the inexperienced maiden the aged libertine says, with the accent acquired from long practice: "I love you!" Woe, if the lascivious old woman, satisfying her old appetite with unripe fruit, knows how to warm the innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is kindled, the flames spread, and the first object loved is placed on the altar with vows of eternal fealty, and perfumed with the incense of the maddest, most unrestrained idolatry.

The first love is not always born so evilly, but it too closely resembles, alas! these first loves which I have just described. Let us be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the wood-worm that in modern society cuts into and corrodes the highest and strongest tree in the garden of life. The original sin of love appears to us with its first cry, and even when we have been forced to use all the artifices of the galvanoplastic to gild our idol, even when the bellows of imagination have worked to inflame the first love, the very first thing we say is a lie: "I love you above everything in this world; I shall love you forever. You are my first love, and one can love but once." And a second vow answers the first, perhaps more sacred and more ardent; and in a kiss, that is often the sum of two lies, the first hypocrisy is sealed, which down to the last generation of the loves of those two beings will seal with an everlasting mark all the expressions of affection, all the cravings of the heart.

Be sincere with the first kiss, if you desire love to be the chief joy of life, not a shameful trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, yours is the first love, but because it is the first it is neither true nor just nor natural that it should be the greatest, the one, the only love. Do not swear falsely, do not perjure yourselves before you know what truth is. To the eternity of your vows, the indifference of tomorrow will answer with a sardonic, mocking grin. Before you have really loved, you will sing in every tune that virtue does not exist, that love is a dream, and, children and elders at the same time, you will forswear a god whose temple you have never seen.

You are two: a man and a woman; and you say that you love each other, and perhaps it is first love for both. Well, then, during the first days do not swear, if you still value the word of an honest man, and if perjury still has terrors for you. Rarely is the first love true love, as the first book of an author rarely is the true expression of his genius. One is weak from excessive youth as from old age; and the one and first and only love, like many other dogmatic formulas which delight so much that pedantic and hypocritical biped called man, has made more victims in modern society than many crimes and many maladies of body and mind ever did. If your love is the first, so much the better; with hands chastely clasped and lips modestly conjoined, do not pronounce any other words but these: "Let us love each other!" If you are among the few and happy mortals who will love but once; if you are among the very few who, in the first woman or in the first man, have found the angel seen in their first dreams of youth, thousand and thousand times blessed! The fidelity of the future will cement for life the virtues of your souls. As for myself, if the increased progress of true and healthy democracy should eliminate from juridical institutions the formula of the oath, I would wish that the man and the woman who love each other should never swear. An adjuration less and a caress more, what a delight! An eternity less, and a longer caress, what voluptuousness! Nor should chaste and chosen souls throw my book away, feeling hurt by my cynic advice. If they will read the pages that follow, they will clearly see that no one more than I intends to elevate love to the most serene regions of the ideal, and that, however high sentiment can ascend, I, also, feel the strength to follow it. The triple and thick skin of hypocrisy that enwraps us from infancy, the Arcadic varnish which makes us look polished and brilliant, nearly always forbid us to see the true nature of things, and in love we are all unmistakably counterfeiters. The greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity alone can cure us of this malady, which is civil rather than national, because it penetrates every race, every social class; it does not spare the highest and strongest natures; it has become an integral part of every fiber of our hearts, of the framework of all our institutions.

Which are the true sources of love? Which are the paths that lead to the sacred temple? There should be an only source, an only path, but so many are those who throng and crowd to enter there, where all expect the greatest joy, that not all enter by the great highway of nature, but through secret gates and oblique ways reach their aim; they are unhappy because the original sin of their loves condemns them to a dangerous life sown with despondency and bitterness.

All the natural flows of the true and great love collect in one source. They are drops which slowly trickle into the depths of our body, and there they gather and form rivulets and streamlets that, in turn, collect in the channel of our veins until they effuse as the warm, quivering wave of sympathy.

Sympathy is the only and true source of love. Sympathy, most beautiful among the beautiful words of human speech! To suffer together, a melancholy vaticination of life lived in two; but better still, to feel, laugh and weep together! Two organisms, but one sense; two exterior worlds, but which unite around a unique center; two nerves that by various ways carry various sensations, but which interweave and run together in one heart. To see, to gaze at, to desire each other. A spark shoots forth from the contact of two desires: such is the first fact of love. Two solitary ships in the desert of the ocean were plowing through the waves, unknown to each other; the wind propelled one near to the other; a shiver of sympathy ran through the sails and the shrouds and caused them to creak simultaneously; they felt pressed by a common need, and cast out a hawser which should tie them together. From that moment they shall plow the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers, and long and sigh for the same land.

The most rapid and ardent sympathies have their sources in the admiration of form, that is to say, in the sentiment of the beautiful which is satisfied by the object which we desire and are about to love. Among the four definitions of love that Tasso was wont to discuss, there are three which express or suggest this idea: "Love is a desire of beauty; Love is the cupidity of embrace for the pleasure of those who covet a particular beauty; Love is the union through pleasure of beauty." And, in fact, what is love if not the choice of the better forms in order to perpetuate them? What is love if not the selection of the best in order that it may triumph over the mediocre, a selection of youth and strength in order that it may survive the old and weak elements? Woman, the custodian of germs, the vestal of life, must be more beautiful than we, and man loves in her the form above all other things; and mediocre forms can, if elevated by a gigantic genius and an impassioned heart, still excite ardent passions. But these are always unstable sympathies, and where a real deformity appears, love is dead, or lives only as a prodigy of heroism, or as an esthetic malady. Woman also is immediately affected by the beauty of virile forms and can love a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy expands and is much higher, and character and genius will seduce her more frequently than is the case with men. The ugliest men enjoyed the superhuman voluptuousness of being loved; but in the attitude of their characters, in the power of their genius, in the greatness of their position, they possessed a fascination which belonged, nevertheless, to the world of beauty. Woman has within herself such a power of transmission of the germinative elements and such an accumulation of beauty as to be capable of doing without the power and the beauty of her companion; but she wants to feel conquered by a superior force, fascinated by something that shines or flashes or thunders.

In love, genius and character exercise very little influence if they do not assume a beautiful form, and esthetics dominate and govern all amorous phenomena. This is not enough: even those who believe that their judgment in making a selection soars to the loftiest spheres of the ideal world, and despise the beautiful as a vulgar fascination of dull and clouded minds, seek, involuntarily, unknowingly, some virtues that bear a deep sexual mark. There may be a philosopher who boasts of having loved a homely but intelligent and sensible woman; but let him search the depths of his heart, let him study the sources of his love, and he will find that he admires and loves in his companion those virtues which are essentially feminine: the flexuous grace of tenderness and the kind intelligence of the heart, or the insuperable cleverness of affection, or the coquettish forms of a refreshing and modest intellect. In other words, the proud despiser of form was seduced by the form, all beautiful and all feminine, of a character or of an intelligence. And woman, when she happens to love an ugly man, is conquered either by dominating intellect, by dazzling ambition, by heroic courage, or by the power of some virtues that bear a deeply virile mark. Sex is too great a portion of the economy of life to be eliminated from our calculations by our caprice, and love is a stream too large to be dammed and directed between the paper dikes of our sophisms and our reticences; and if some one should not be convinced yet that beauty is the supreme inciter of every amorous sympathy, let him remember that love is the passion of youth, and this is always a chosen form of beauty.

It rarely happens that two flashes from the eyes of a man and of a woman who meet for the first time should kindle one fire only. This is the ideal of the most ardent sympathies, the most fortunate combination in the great, hazardous game of life. To meet suddenly, to see, to admire, to desire each other at once and to embrace with such a look as if it came from above; to feel inundated by a gaze, equally warm and penetrating; to blush together and to feel all at once that two hearts beat louder and mutely make this sweet confession: "I love you, and you are mine!"—all this is a joy too rare, too beautiful, one which few mortals have known and few will know.

It happens more frequently that nascent sympathies proceed unequally, so that the one has already carried a man to the highest summits of desire and passion, while the other hardly begins to stir; the one already throbs, the other only faintly vibrates. Even when two loves are called to high and fortunate destinies, even when they will soon spread their robust wings together in the space of bliss, a task is reserved to woman in the vicissitudes of love, so different from ours that she cannot feel with us the same sudden and violent emotions. Man says everything with a look; unhesitatingly and proudly he acknowledges his defeats. Woman, even under the spell of the most ardent sympathy, lowers her eyelids, refuses the too intense light and protects her heart with all the refrigeratives and sedatives at her command. Man has already said to woman a hundred times with the flash of his eyes: "I love you!" The woman, trembling, hardly dares to say: "Perhaps I will love you!" And away run those two happy beings, fleeing from each other, until the sympathy of the one equals that of the other, until the supreme languor of a long battle is smothered in two notes which vibrate together with the sweetest harmony, while they say to each other, with a sigh, "I love you!" and to nature repeat with another sigh: "Thanks!"

The energies of amorous desire, which the longer they last the larger they grow, follow the laws of elementary physics governing the forces. The most instantaneous love is not the most durable, and if an unexpected satisfaction follows a sudden desire, love may sometimes resemble a glorious rape rather than a true and real passion. It is true that love is not a battle but a long war, and when the first victory is followed by a hundred, a thousand victories, the fulmineous sympathy also may take deep roots in our hearts, and rallying after nearly every struggle, may pervade us all and reach the ideal perfection of coupling intensity with extensiveness, of twinkling at the same time with the light of those stars that never set and that of the lightning flash that plows the skies. The most perfect love is a sun that never sets, but does cast forth now and then more scintillant flashes. In ordinary cases, however, loves that rise slowly, slowly die away; and those of the nature of lightning last as long as lightning. In all cases, a healthy love, well constituted and destined for a prolific existence, whether born suddenly or slowly, should begin with a violent shock that measures the depths from which the warm sympathy sprang forth. All other affectionate sentiments arise in a manner different from love, whose nature it is to be born amidst thunder and lightning, as gods or demons should be born. Princes cannot come into the world like the masses; and the Prince of Affections cannot come to light with the assistance of an intelligent and affectionate midwife and the domestic cares of relatives. Where a coruscation of the skies and a trembling of the earth do not attend the birth of the new love; where nature does not rend the air with a cry of voluptuousness or of pain, no one can deceive me: a friendship, an affection, some sort of a sentiment, may have come into existence; but I shall certainly not christen the new-born with the sacred baptism of love.

And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate the only legitimate way by which we may enter the temple from those ways that lead to it through oblique and unused paths. Friendship can be a source of love, and a very good one, but it is always a pathological, unnatural origin, which leads step by step to the worst of the sources of love, such as gratitude, compassion, vanity, lust, revenge.

When one has been able to see a woman during a long time, talk to her and perhaps live with her without calling her by any other name but that of sister or friend, if he feels some day that he loves her, such love resembles those tropical fruits grown in our climate by means of manure and hothouse. Whether friendship is possible between man and woman is an old problem which will never be solved, because many give that name to true, real loves, which, approaching the threshold of desire, held back, perhaps, by the rigid hand of duty, oscillate suavely and lingeringly in front of the temple without ever entering it. It is by a conventional politeness that to these loves we give the name of friendship, and I will certainly not condemn such innocent falsification; but a true and real friendship, with all the specific characteristics that distinguish this serene affection between man and woman, is not possible except on one condition: to obliterate every sexual mark in the two beings that have shaken hands. And the elimination of the sex in an individual is such a cruel mutilation, both physical and moral, that it destroys more than half of man. If friendship unites two eunuchs of this kind, I shall say that their affection is no longer that which exists between man and woman, but that of two neutral beings. However, as long as a single desire of the other's person is possible in them, as long as the most chaste, the most innocent of desires may arise in them, friendship becomes love. How many are these moral eunuchs? How many men and women can love without desire? Count them and then I shall be able to tell you how many are the cases, well ascertained, of friendship without love between man and woman.

I wish, nevertheless, to be more explicit, so that I may not seem to go on beating about the bushes without attacking and solving the question because I find it difficult. Are there in this sublunary world a man and a woman glad to see each other, who love each other and who have never desired even a kiss from each other? Yes; those two angels, then, are friends and I admit the possibility of the psychological phenomenon of friendship between two persons of different sex.

From any form of mild affection one can pass to love, and therefore much more easily from that friendship between man and woman knowingly admitted by us as possible. Long-lasting and healthy loves may arise in this way, but they always have a cold skin and a somewhat lymphatic hue. They require restoratives, a hydropathic cure, and, sometimes, cod-liver oil as well, because from the lymphatic they may also pass to the scrofulous stage. A common variety of this kind of loves is that which originates from gratitude.

"Love who to none beloved to love remits" sang the poet, and he told the truth; but this goes on one condition, that between the two who love each other there shall be no other difference but in the length of the step; that is to say, that one should arrive first and the other join him afterward; otherwise they would never meet on the main road of sympathy. You, O tutors, who believe in the love of a pupil; you, gentlemen, who believe in the love of the orphan girl whom you have helped out of her poverty; you, old bachelors, who believe in the love of the grateful chambermaid, remember that gratitude alone did never generate a legitimate love. If gratitude takes you by the hand and leads you on the road of sympathy, it may be a good guide, but nothing more. There are men and women who very much resemble cold-blooded animals, which have the same temperature as the ambient that surrounds them, but can generate little or no heat. They know not how to love of themselves, and it is necessary that another love descend upon them to soak them, to saturate them, like cake dipped in wine. Their sympathies are cold and equal for all; they often ask of books and men what is love, and compare the descriptions by others to what they feel in their hearts, like the naturalist who turns and turns an insect in his hands, compares it to the pictures before him, and finally exclaims: "It really seems to me that this insect is the Amor verus of the entomologists. I, too, do love, really love." For all these gentlemen, whose number is much greater than supposed, the verse of the poet is most true, and they always love out of gratitude or compassion, which is almost the same.

That mild and sweet affection which is love out of gratitude must not be confused with that commiseration which women especially feel for those who love them desperately, and to whom they often concede not love, but love out of pity. Woman is easily moved; she cannot look on apathetically when a man suffers, and frequently yields, not out of lewdness but of pity, which is also coupled with the legitimate pride of being able to transform a wretched being into a happy man. And man often takes advantage of this weakness of Eve and wickedly abuses it, and is ready, later, to calumniate her who has made him happy. Man, too, can love out of compassion, but more frequently concedes himself without affection and through pride, as we shall see further on in the course of our studies.

Woman, however, sometimes concedes love, together with voluptuousness, to him who weeps, sighs and suffers for her. Compassion is the benevolent chord which vibrates even in natures brutally egotistical; while in woman, rich in so many affections, it can vibrate until it tortures her. This sentiment, however, is, of its own nature, tender and mild, and by placing a hand on him who suffers, keeps him always in a state of subjection, so that true equality can never exist between the one who inspires compassion and the one who feels it. This is the essential character of compassion; and even when, by narrow, long and thorny paths, it leads us to love, this is always under the influence of its bastardly origin. All loves out of compassion are forms of affectionate commiseration, of benign protection, and lack the highest notes of passion. They strongly resemble the verses of him who is not a poet; the god of fire does not pervade, does not inflame them; they do not know the sacred agitation of the sibyl; and if they can live long in a mild climate, they can, however, be suddenly overthrown by the appearance of the true god, who demands his rights, his tributes of blood and of ardors. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet experienced any love other than that inspired in her by compassion, may deceive herself, may believe that she loves truly and deeply; but woe to her, if a real and warm sympathy should awake in her heart, that she may make a comparison between the true love and the false one! The weak little plant of an affection long guarded by commiseration will fall and be carried away by the fury of the impetuous stream, and the poor creature, who really loves for the first time, may suffer the most excruciating pain, and be made to fight the bloodiest struggles between duty and passion, between commiseration and love. I know only too well that among the thousand forms of cowardly love there is also the cowardice which begs love on bended knees, but I would prefer to be loved by caprice, revenge or lechery, rather than by compassion. The woman who loves us in that way has always her heel on our heads; and although the sweet pressure of a woman's little foot may be as dear as the caress of her hand, in the face of nature we commit an act of cowardice and invert the most elementary laws of the physiology of the sexes. The man who waives the primacy of conquest is a lion that allows his mane to be shorn, a Samson with clipped hair, always a mild and disguised form of eunuch. May fortune protect you all from love out of compassion!

A still more turbid source of love is vanity; to hear that a woman is very beautiful and chaste, that she has never permitted herself to be loved, is an immediate stimulus of sudden ambition to the man who knows that he is strong and adores the daughters of Eve. And the daughters of Eve, in turn, very willingly persist in throwing the baited hook to catch the cold, lonely fish who lives in the most dark recesses of solitude and chastity. Hence many challenges sent and taken which lead oftener to a conquest of bodies than to true love. The great woman-lovers, who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love, are accustomed to conquer all the conquerable solely for vanity's sake, solely to tie with amorous chains to their triumphal chariot a new slave and a new victim. They nearly always like to conquer the most difficult and different characters, and you may find them ardently wishing to give the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent as well as to subjugate the most cunning and oldest libertines. Besides vanity, the goad of morbid curiosity has its share in this choice of victims, as curiosity is one of the strongest threads in the psychological web of woman. A tart, wild fruit may stimulate the appetite of a palate too dull, as would the mordant pungency of cheese too old; the frivolous woman is passionately fond of this alternating of sour and burning tastes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and men only too well versed in it; and lechery may go so far in these natures as to cause them to love through mere curiosity of the unknown, even excluding lust, which is not always necessary in these pathological tastes. At any rate, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a posthumous sympathy may awaken a real love with healthy members and a long life. It is, however, always a love that resembles the rich man who was born a peasant and, true upstart that he is, may, in the midst of luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner, kick you out of his presence when you least can afford it. To be born well is really the first problem of life in all cases, and democracy itself cannot succeed in overthrowing the ancient aristocracy unless it can boast of a legitimate and noble birth.

Man, who daily accuses of vanity his female companion, shows oftener than the latter the most grotesque and clownish forms of that sentiment; and we rarely see him renounce the puerile ostentation of those of his loves which had the bastardly origin of vanity. How often has he reached the lowest stage of cowardice by casting up to the woman who blessed him with love, that he sought her love only to adorn with another trophy his triumphal chariot! Woman, instead, almost always, even when she has desired to be loved out of vanity alone, even when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, will give him a testimonial which makes him happy, does not humiliate him, and will satisfy him that he pleased—for a day, a month, a year—the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him very blandly. No man feels humiliated in thinking that he was the sweet victim of a caprice; all feel dejected if made the target of a vainglorious speculation. And many other times, woman, with a very refined and generous tact, pretends not to understand that she is desired and loved solely out of vanity, and gradually succeeds in making men love her for herself, and for herself alone. The friendly enemy not perceiving it, she succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and warm passion for the narrow ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that woman is superior to us in sentiment in the same degree as we are superior to her in mental strength; one of the thousand proofs that woman always endeavors to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often want to force under the Caudine Forks of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagles, were born on the highest rocks of psychology.

Lust is the prolific mother of most vulgar loves; nay, this sentiment is to many only the necessity of drinking at a spring found to be sweeter than any other. Nude love, without the splendid garments of imagination and heart, stripped even of the robust flesh lent to it by the sentiment of the beautiful, is reduced to a skeleton which is lust and which for very many is all they think of love. What a poor, wretched thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a cup which we prefer to any other because we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst out of it. To have possessed before having loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love! What ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that, at times, it can perform the prodigy of being born of lechery.

Loves born of lust are the most difficult to preserve, and every day of their life is a difficult and rare conquest. Even the most perfidious cunning of the arts of pleasing blunts against insurmountable difficulties, and woman, after having brought into play all the witchery of body and heart, may see her victim snatched away from her by the first comer. Love may be warm, ardent, thirsty, but the glass that satisfies it is always made of the most fragile crystal and may at any moment fall and be shattered into a hundred pieces.

Revenge, which is a form of hatred, may, by incestuous nuptials, become a mother, or better, a stepmother of love. To be deceived and to know it, to wish to humiliate the guilty by flaunting in the latter's face a new love, to seek it, finding it in one day: there is the source of love out of revenge. The unfortunate paranymph who acts as the call-bird of a degraded passion does not always perceive the trap, allows himself to be loved, loves, and often amuses the person who pretends to love him and those who unconcernedly witness the shameful spectacle. Vanity makes us blind, and it does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the period of a day we have been seen, desired, conquered; and while, inflated with pride, we display our feathers like a peacock, we do not realize that we are actors in a comedy staged to humiliate him or her who is loved always and more than ever. In some very humiliating cases we serve as rubefacient and sink so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard poultice or a leech; and the cure effected at our expense is so quick and perfect that we are immediately dismissed, like a physician who is impatiently paid and impatiently taken leave of because his services are no longer required.

These, however, are the most unfortunate cases, and belong to the ugliest pathology of the human heart; in other instances love out of revenge becomes, through the virtue of either or both of the lovers, a true and real love which cures the old wound and opens a wide horizon of happiness to the man and to the woman who have become acquainted in such a strange manner, and it may then be said that he who was to be the revengeful executioner, the unconscious minister of the justice of love, becomes, instead, first the physician and afterward the lover of the offended, and a new love arises on the ruins of the old one.

I certainly do not claim to have studied all the pure and impure sources of love, but I would feel satisfied if I had touched upon the most important ones, and outlined the genealogy of this sentiment. In an analytical work, however great may be the care exercised in order not to detach adherent things, it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some fiber or destroying anything. It frequently occurs that the source of love is not one, but double, or is formed by the collecting of various streamlets, so that it would be difficult to state whether the new-born is a legitimate son or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy may be associated with great vanity, but the desire for revenge may, fortunately for us, fall in with a warm and violent affection. Thus, lust, vanity, compassion, gratitude, may meet at the same time and fecundate a love which later may flow limpid and pure in its bed, although its source was an impure, muddy stream.

Sometimes a human being loves another not for the latter's sake, but out of a strange resemblance which the latter bears to a person long loved and, perhaps, already lost; thus it happens that one may love the daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been cases in which one has loved even three successive generations. The excessive disproportion in the age of the lovers, a certain mummy effluvium exhaled even by the most carefully embalmed bodies, gives to those loves a character that induces me to place them at least on the frontiers that separate physiology from pathology; I would, therefore, term them "physio-pathological."

Loves of mixed origin are the purer and warmer, the larger the part played in them by sympathy, and this element alone would suffice to allot a place to them in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and so prepotent that more than once affections suffering from a dangerous illness recovered suddenly at the tender remembrance of these thoughts: "You really loved me one day of your life." "You are mine by love and nothing else." "And yet I loved you!" Often a man born in the highest place and of noblest blood sinks gradually into the mire, loses his dignity, his fortune, even the most superficial appearance of manners and behavior; yet if you observe him attentively you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the majestic tone of his voice, in some refined taste, such traces of his ancient origin as may have survived the shipwreck. And so it happens with a well-born love. I have seen passions dragged in the mire of abjection, tattered and foul, like a velvet rag picked up in the gutter; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and infamy; but in those poor shreds I have always found something that had remained intact and revealed its ancient and noble origin; and with my own eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections that seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of the divine intervention and of the galley-slaves too arcadically rehabilitated through the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.

When love begins we may entertain some doubts as to the reality of the passion before our eyes. The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in the serene sky some clouds pass and evanesce in the deep azure; perhaps in the distant mist we behold, at times, a lightning flash; but will we have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is forced to answer, it may, in these cases, make the same solemn mistakes as the meteorologists in their almanacs or from the university chair. Embryos in their first stage are all similar, and even the most powerful microscope cannot distinguish today the egg of the lion from that of the rabbit. Incipient sympathies, growing friendships, affinities about to become loves, are all crepuscular things faintly delineated on the gray horizon, and the human eye may be easily deceived; but we cannot cast any blame upon it. And love, too, assumes so manifold and varied disguises as to render it difficult for us to make a good diagnosis in many cases. However, it is always easier to recognize love in our own home than in that of others, notwithstanding the fact that it is much more important for our happiness to know whether we are loved than to realize that we really are in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the mendacious, you may be helped by this physio-psychological essay, while in order to explore your own heart scant attention to the phase of your sentiments will suffice.

One truly loves when to the agonizing cry: "A man!—A woman!" a friendly distant voice replies: "Do not weep; I am here!" One loves when, after hearing that voice, the cry subsides and the deep void of desire is filled. One loves when the desire of the beloved is placed above everything else. One loves when one suddenly blushes or pales if he hears a name or the familiar swish of a garment that approaches. One loves when one involuntarily has on one's lips one name only a hundred times in a day, or when one ceases to pronounce a word which one was pronouncing a hundred times before. One loves when one's eyes are always fixed on one point of the star-map where the creature dwells who has become half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to the mirror at every instant to ask of oneself, "Am I beautiful enough?" and when one restlessly explores the abyss of one's own conscience with the query, "Can I be loved?" One loves when in every fiber of the heart, in every atom of the organism, the sap of life is stirred and rushes through every vein and every nerve, so that an intimate, penetrating, deep commotion warns us with thrilling voice that something great and unusual is in us, as though God had visited us. This is the true love, that is not appeased by lust, nor quieted by ambition, nor cooled by distance, that does not even lose itself in the dreams of the night; the love that, to abandon us, must carry away with itself a large piece of bleeding flesh and tortured nerves.

CHAPTER III THE FIRST WEAPONS OF LOVE—COURTSHIP

How subtle and mysterious must that high chemistry be which unites the germinative elements of two organisms of different sex to renew life and generate a new organism! It does not suffice that in the calm and long silence of thirty or forty years, half lived by a man and half by a woman, the gemmulæ have prepared and made ready to call and attract each other; it does not suffice that the powerful energies of sexual affinities have accumulated; it still does not suffice that a sudden sympathy shall prepare the spark and the conflagration. All this long activity of nature has prepared things in order that the great phenomenon may occur; but the atoms that seek each other and ardently desire to unite must long oppose each other in order to rekindle the ardors and centuplicate the energies. To the human male the aggressive mission has been assigned; to the human female, the difficult task of defending herself. The part assigned to man is simple and requires only strength, physical or moral, intellectual or made complex by many elements; yet always an energy of attack and seduction, to assail and overthrow, one after the other, curtain-walls and ramparts, barricades and lunettes, all the intricate system of fortifications which woman erects against man to defend herself; or rather, to let herself be defeated slowly and chastely.

To woman, on the other hand, nature has assigned a task much more difficult and cruel. She must repudiate what she desires; she must struggle against the voluptuousness which invades her, repel him whom she loves, exact sacrifices when she would ask only for kisses, be avaricious when everything urges her to be generous. She must collect all her meager strength to defend a gate vigorously attacked, and cry out aloud, "Wait!" to him whom she would like to press sweetly to her bosom.

The battles of desire and coquetry, of ardor and modesty, impatience and reticence are fought in the various countries and in the various epochs with widely different strategy and tactics, but all may be reduced to this general formula. Even when the sweet chain of sympathy prepares a sure love for two lovers, the one says, "Immediately," and the other answers "Later." When the sexes exchange their strategy and tactics, and invert their amorous missions, there invariably arises a violent disorder, and virtue and esthetics are submerged in the same shipwreck.

In Paraguay, where laxity of customs prevails, a most impatient young man, who had reasons to believe himself loved, would repeat in every key, from the most tender to the most impassioned, with sobbing voice and tyrannical accent, this one word: "Today!" And the beautiful Creole, who knew nothing of Darwin and sexual selection, would reply smilingly: "But why today? You have known me for ten days only; in two months, perhaps." In this artless reply that Paraguayan girl was evolving the philosophy of seduction and coquetry, the fundamental lines of the physiology of the sexes.

Every day the most beautiful half of the human race throws in our faces the rude accusation that we are much less exacting in our tastes, and that, satisfied with the external forms, we rarely seek to determine the substance. And it is natural that it should happen this way; the different missions assigned to each of the two sexes in the amorous strategy require that this should be done. If certain contours exercise so great and immediate a sway over us, it is because we seek in them, unwittingly and involuntarily, the good mother and the good nurse; and, more than it seems, voluptuousness prepares the future generations for the good and the better. To fructify a human female, who shall become a good mother and a good nurse, the flash of a desire and the instantaneous ardor of a battle will suffice; but woman does not seek a fecundator only; she wants her companion to be the defender of her future children, the protector of her weakness; she wants to assure herself as to the deep energy of the passion of him who says he loves her; she wants to sound the abysses of heart and mind. The man shall build the nest: is he an architect? He shall defend it from rapacious animals: is he courageous? He shall train and enrich his children: has he talent, ambition, tenacity of purpose? He must know all this. For some time she has been aware that she is young and beautiful; many a time the ardent rays of a thousand desires have showered upon her; at her command numerous adorers would fall at her feet, all young, perhaps, handsome and robust; but she does not want a man; she wants the man who will be lastingly, powerfully and ardently hers. This is how, in the initial web of love, we read the inexorable laws which govern it; how clearly nature explains to us the inevitable fickleness of human males, their polygamic wanderings and their unreasonable requirements; just as modesty, chastity and the sublime reticence of woman are the faithful guardians of the destinies of the future family. Much of this elementary strategy was lost in the stormy vicissitudes of modern civilization; it is necessary to scrape off much varnish and snatch away many rags in order to touch the robust members of the primitive passions; nevertheless, through multiform hypocrisy, we succeed in finding the kernel of the thing.

Even in the rarer and more fortunate cases of two lovers suddenly and simultaneously struck by a sympathy equally warm and energetic, it is necessary that man and woman should court each other for a longer or shorter period of time. They should show to each other, in a hundred ways, their physical, moral and intellectual beauties. After having been rapidly conquered through their glances, they must re-conquer each other every day, every hour, with the seductions of the heart, grace and talent. It is necessary that the great god should receive the homage of all our beauties, all our virtues, all our perfections. From morning till night, we go on gleaning from the fields, picking from gardens and orchards and roaming through forests and over mountains, in order to carry to the altar of our idol every leaf, every flower, and every fruit which our hands can snatch away from fruitful nature. Sublime contest of homages and tributes, sublime profusion of riches and forces! The woman, also, who feels sure of being already loved brings to the altar a fresh sheaf of corn ears, a fresh bouquet of flowers, and exultantly exclaims: "This, too, is yours!" And man, although not doubting that he is the god of his companion, approaches every moment the door of the temple, he also carrying a new fruit, a new treasure, and always repeats: "This, too, is yours!"

These reciprocal seductions especially succeed where dissimilarities are deeper between the two lovers, whether proceeding from different sympathy, age, beauty, or from any other difference of some importance between the two that must unite to make one individual. It is then necessary that the increased energies of the one should conquer by degrees the treasures of the other, so that the differences may vanish or diminish and an equilibrium be brought about without which perfect love is impossible. One hundred volumes would not suffice to describe the craftinesses with which man conquers a woman's love, to enumerate the hundred thousand arts with which woman warms tepid sympathies or carries to delirium a great passion. In many cases the intriguant holds off a step further every day "the aim of his warm desires," and while the avid and ardent hand is on the point of picking the fruit, this is withdrawn by an invisible and cruel hand. "Higher, higher, still higher," the young girl seems to say to the puppy which jumps to catch the cracker from her rosy hands; and "Higher, still higher," cry and should cry the women of the entire world to the man who sighs and asks for their love.

Longer, more persistent, more fiery is the battle between desire and conquest, and richer is the trophy of victory. The daughters of Eve never regret the time lost in the first fights of love; not only do long wars prepare the most splendid victories, but the first struggles are of themselves, and for themselves alone, a better part of love's paradise, and a long string of easy conquests is not worth one fierce and bloody battle of enticements. If, however, O daughters of Eve, you have the brilliant but dangerous mission of defending yourselves from a compact phalanx of adorers, you must redouble your arts of strategy and tactics. If you are really powerful, victory cannot fail you, and you will choose the best among the best. Train your impatience and kill the weak with time. The first to withdraw are the pallid loves and the desires of libertinism. True and deep passions ignore impatience and weariness, and, fighting every day, and every day advancing, they leave the disputed field strewn with corpses; and when you, tired in turn, proffer your hand to those who have long waited and long struggled, you may rest assured that you are among the blest.

Physiological seduction, or conquest of love by nature's law, is called by the English-speaking people courtship, and Darwin, by using this word in a much broader sense and for all animals, has impressed upon it the precious and wholly scientific mark. Coquetry is only a form of this art of seduction and conquest, and belongs already to the field of pathology. Much more frequent in woman, it is also seen in man; and it is so deeply rooted in some natures that it springs up before puberty and disappears only with death. Self-esteem, however, plays in it a part so great that its history belongs rather to the domain of pride than of love. Physiological seduction is a necessity; coquetry is a vice; the need of pleasing is one of the most fundamental elements of love, one of its most useful tools; coquetry has only itself for aim. When the conquest is made, physiological seduction lowers its weapons and withdraws; coquetry, on the contrary, is immortal and every day it grows afresh with new ardor and new yearning. To satisfy it, it is necessary to awaken daily a new desire in those who have already been vanquished, and new passions in those who have not been conquered yet, no matter whether we share the passion or not. Above all, woman wishes to be loved by many; and, in the less reprehensible cases, around true love she wishes to entwine a garland of sympathies. While the heart is given to one alone, she dispenses smiles, sighs—perhaps, also, half-chaste kisses and semi-libertine caresses—to those she does not wish to lose as adorers and whom she deems it opportune to keep in bondage, tying them to herself with the subtle but strong thread of hope. In the gravest cases the heart cannot be given to any one, because it has been promised to all, and the huge task of pleasing many wearies the sentiment and breaks the vertebræ of character in such a way as to make impossible the development of any sincere and ardent affection. The most indefatigable coquettes and the most worn-out flirts never love; and if, in questions of love, not falling means to be virtuous, then coquetry can be said to be most pure and most holy. Every day the moral sense rebels at seeing many women selling smiles and desires every hour and, posing as Lucretias, impunely playing with lasciviousness which they do not feel, and with love which does not burn them, while they hurl anathemas at the woman who may, perhaps, have fallen but once, torn, as it were, by a true and strong passion, guilty of no other wrong than believing mendacity and treachery impossible. The virtue of the coquette is like that of the asbestos, which resists the fire by its fire-proof nature; it is a virtue entirely physical, anatomical, and he who values it does not possess a shadow of moral sense, nor has he even read a page of the physiology of the human heart.

Readers, if you have the misfortune of loving a coquettish woman, never forget that coquetry belongs to the history of the lust of sentiment; and if you thirst for love, go and seek it elsewhere, for you have taken the wrong road to it. Where you are, do seek play and folly, pyrotechnics, acrobatism, the tintinnabulation of the fool's bells, the laughter of the masquerader; but do not seek ardent voluptuousness, or the sublime palpitations of an affection which never was the companion of coquetry.

True love, which does not seek voluptuousness only, but the full, absolute, complete possession of all the beloved, cannot bring into play the subtle arts of the diplomacy of coquetry, because it cannot have the patience to study them, or the calmness to learn them. It is a genius that knows not how to adapt itself to the domestic cares of the home life; a general who knows how to win battles, but does not waste any attention on the buttons of the uniforms and on barrack regulations. Love shines, thunders, weeps, fulminates, threatens and prays; overthrown, it overthrows; wounded, it kills. It curses and blesses, but is wrong in one thing only: it does not know the game of chess. Coquetry, on the contrary, is the most famous chess-player ever known.

Natural seduction is the art of making all our values well appreciated by presenting them with the best possible appearance. To please, we better ourselves as much as we can, and, made beautiful by nature and art, knock at the door through which affections enter. Man, who is the stronger of the two who love, and from strength derives his most irresistible seductions, after having tossed his leonine hair throws himself habitually at the feet of the woman and begs an alms of love. And woman, who is the weaker of the two, loves to disarrange with her gentle hands the mane of the king of animals, to tease him and to enjoy the superhuman voluptuousness of placing her foot on strength, to feel it quiver underneath and be able to say: "It is mine!" This is one of the most general forms of the reciprocal seduction of the sexes; and when man, on his knees and, perhaps, weeping, pleads for love, he obeys one of the most inexorable laws of nature and does not appear a coward, nor does he debase himself. Before throwing himself down in the dust, he must have shown flashes and thunder. "Lion for all, lamb for myself!"—such is the man who claims a woman; she wants only to be the Franklin of the human lightning and to attract it to herself and conduct it along the most subtle wires of her nervous organism. And when grace has conquered strength the daughter of Eve feels complete; and when the man feels the rough skin of his herculean nature caressed by the soft contact of a woman's body, he also feels as though redoubled; and both, in the fullness of bliss, feel changed into that perfect being which is the sum of a man and a woman.

When a difficult problem belonging to the moral world presents itself to us, the only way to resolve it is that of simplifying it by leading it again to the broad highway of physiology. To read and re-read the great book of nature, trying to follow blindly its laws in the human world: there is art. This is manifest at every step in our studies on the sentiment of love. Which are the elements that make a woman seductive above all others? Beauty, grace, affection. Which are the virtues that make a man fascinating above all others? Strength, courage, talent. There is seduction, there is sympathy, which seem the most foolish and the most mysterious things in the world, taken back to the virgin source of the physiology of the sexes; there is an opening through which we see much of the light of future progress. Man must make himself more manly than ever in order to seduce and conquer the love of the daughters of Eve; and woman must always make herself more womanly in order to please the sons of Adam. And both must refine and elevate the type of their respective sexes, higher and higher, to the greatest sublimity which human hands and poet's wings may attain. Woman may dress, if she likes, with all the allurements of art; she may adorn her hair with the fragrant flowers of sentiment, assume all the classic graces and consume us with the fire of all her physical and moral seductions; but, at the bottom, there should ever remain a female, and under the wings of an angel and a cherub there should always be an Eve. And man may torture his ambition in order to bend it under the heel of love, and spur his talent so that it may throw its treasures at the feet of his idol; he may be a hero or a martyr, Spartacus or Cæsar, a tamed lion or a roaring lion; but in his loves let him always be as manly as ever, so that woman, after having stripped her hero, may always find an Adam. Seduction is never baseness, never violence, never treachery, never tyranny, when it is inspired by a true and great love, when it is the alliance of all our forces guided by the most legitimate, the most powerful, the most ardent of our desires, that of loving and being loved. Without love, seduction is a rape of voluptuousness, or a bargain in mordant vanities; it is either a crime or a vice.

CHAPTER IV MODESTY

Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena the physiological study of which is more difficult because that phenomenon is very indistinct and vague, although prepotent and most exacting in some of its forms; because it is very variable in the different races; and because, though a part of the energies which develop in the reciprocal approaching of the sexes, it seems to keep them apart, and, born of love, seems to have a tendency to frustrate its supreme end.

I, too,—I must admit it,—through the various periods of life, have changed the idea I first had of modesty. At first it seemed to me a sentiment that rises within us in childhood and during adolescence, as spontaneous as egotism, self-esteem and love; but, later, I became convinced that modesty is taught first and learned afterward; therefore, it is one of those sentiments which I term acquired or secondary.

Modesty is an extra-current of love, and has its principal source in those powerful energies which, through a battle or a choice, must relight the torch of life. Animals demonstrate to us some rudimentary forms originating from modesty. Many of them conceal themselves when offering a sacrifice to voluptuousness; very many females, sought by the male, begin by fleeing, resisting, hiding that which they desire to concede. And this is probably an irreflective, automatic act; it is, perhaps, a form of fear which rises before the aggressive demands of the male; but the aim of these resistances, of these pretenses of modesty is to excite the male as much as the female and to make the ground better fitted for fecundation. It is possible that animals conceal their loves from our sight to protect themselves from danger, knowing that in those supreme moments they are exposed to every attack; but until the psychology of brutes is so limited we will be allowed to assume that among them also the first light of modesty has penetrated. If this be so, then we will find justification in the fact that, in superior animals also, this sentiment appears first in the female, for whom the anatomy of the organs and the defensive mission in the battles of love make the actions of modesty more spontaneous and natural. And to the human female, too, nature has assigned the same mission, making her characteristically a hundred times more modest than the male.

The first hand brought by woman to cover parts which the male wished to see gave origin to the first energies of the sentiment of modesty, which arose, therefore, at the same time as the first forms of coquetry. Man and woman, then living together in the family or in the tribe, were naturally forced to become, independently of their greater psychical development, the most modest animals, because woman is subject to repulsive periodical infirmities and man shows other genital phenomena which, if not concealed, would attract too much attention from all and excite perturbation in males and in females. It is therefore natural that almost all, not to say all, races of the earth present some form of modesty, and that also in the human race the female should be more modest than the male, because the aggressive mission, which is reserved to him by nature, makes modesty dangerous and almost impossible, at least in the last battles.

Modesty, born in this way, is taught, together with many other things, by men to children, as the latter cannot, until they reach puberty, distinguish the special importance of copulative organs, or the aggressive mission of the male, or the thousand offensive and defensive vicissitudes of love. Modesty, however, is perhaps born spontaneously, or, to use a better expression, by heredity in the more perfect and elevated natures. Hence modesty is taught to those who, of themselves, would not know it, and we determine its limits in such a way as to circumscribe it within the purely genital field or to widen it beyond the amorous boundaries. The Sherihat prescribes that Turkish women should cover the back of the hand, but permits them to expose the palm. The Armenian women of the population of southern India cover their mouths wherever they happen to be, even in their own homes, and when they go out they wrap themselves in a white cloth. The married women live in strict seclusion, and for many years they cannot see their male relatives, hiding their faces even from the father-in-law and the mother-in-law. And these two examples, selected from a thousand that might be quoted, should be sufficient to persuade us that accessory and conventional elements often accompany true modesty, to which, physiologically, they do not belong. We, ourselves, in our own countries, find that the boundaries of modesty are, in many places, marked by the various fashions of dress, and that they stop from the knees down or from the breast up and not according to the national mode of dress. He who mistook these conventional elements for modesty could write the great psychological heresy, that this sentiment had its origin in the custom of covering the body.

We must not confound with true modesty those other esthetic needs which compel us to conceal some repulsive actions of our animal life. The true sentiment of modesty defends from profane eyes the organs and the mysteries of love and those parts of the body that are directly or indirectly related to it. We behold almost all races conceal first the genitals, afterward the sides, the breast, the legs, the arms, then the entire trunk, and finally the head; but here modesty yields the place to the requirements of social intercourse or of jealousy.

The sentiment of modesty is among the most changeable in form and degree. Its ethnical history is written in the volume which I have dedicated to the ethnology of love. It will suffice here to point out that I divide the nations into immodest, semi-modest and modest, according to the traces of modesty and the greater or less development of this sentiment. Modesty is unlike intelligence, or the sentiment of the beautiful, or other psychical phenomena, which show an ascending and regular progress as we gradually proceed from the lowest races to the highest; therefore, it cannot be considered alone as a dynamometer of progress. The Tehuelches of South America bathe very often, generally before dawn: but the men go into the water separately from the women; they are very modest people who never, in any case, take off their chirípas. And the Japanese, with a civilization a hundred times superior to that of the Tehuelches, are much inferior to them in the matter of modesty. The Malaysians are very modest, but the Greeks and the Romans were none too much so. Without leaving our own race and times, we have women who would die rather than subject themselves to an examination with the speculum, while men of great intelligence and lofty passions admit that they hardly feel a shadow of modesty.

In the higher races, however, if we neglect a few exceptions and take human groups in great masses, we may say that modesty, like all psychical phenomena of a high order, grows, refines and presents more delicate forms proportionately to the growth of the moral and intellectual importance of a people. The nations which are the most advanced in civilization and morality are also the most modest. Modesty is one of the most elect forms of the seductions and the reticences of love; an extra-current of the great fundamental phenomena of generation; a physical self-respect; one of the psychical phenomena of the highest order. Faithful companion of love, it is a sentiment which in superior natures possesses infinite mysteries, ineffable delicacies, gestures deserving a virtue prize, glances which are a paradise, words and sighs which deserve to be immortalized by the pen of an artist. He who possesses the immodest or semi-modest nature of the Fuegian or the Japanese loses more than half of the treasures of love, and is like a man who, deprived of the olfactory sense, admires the flowers of a garden.

Woman is the vestal of modesty, the queen of its most elect forms, and, when a virgin and as pure as crystal, she possesses intact the entire treasure of the most exquisite chastity. Wandering through the garden of love, she loses some of its gems, and she loses more if her companion helps her to disperse the treasure. It very rarely happens, however, that a woman, even in the exciting and wearing races of a thousand loves, loses all the wealth of modesty with which nature has enriched her. Even in the most gay and libertine life, even in the filth of libertinism, we see with infinite wonder some diamonds flash, which the fire of lust was incapable of destroying and the mud of amorous simony could not soil. We remain astonished and moved at such a power of resistance in a sentiment that seems so fragile and delicate. And as long as a corner of sacred earth remains to woman upon which a humble flower of modesty grows, virtue is not all dead and resurrection is still possible. Bow your head before this flower, you, jeering deniers of every feminine virtue! you, insatiable tormentors of lust. Respect that clod of sacred earth; do not pluck that humble and last flower of a garden, which you so brutally have stripped of all leaves and reduced to desolation!

Modesty is never excessive when it is sincere; it is never too exacting when it rises spontaneously from the heart of a lofty nature; it is a sentiment that can inspire only noble things and prepare us for sublime joys. Modesty has such power that it can elevate ignorance and simplicity to the highest spheres and encircle with a halo the most common loves as well as the most exalted; it is possessed of such esthetic energies as to smother with flowers the most bestial roar of the most brazen man and hide with an impenetrable veil the most immodest secrets of the animal man. Without any need of cloth or garments, this sublime wizard will cover a nude body with a mantle that will make it invisible and impenetrable to lust. Guardian and priest of love, it follows it at every step and defends it from the mire and from the fire, and, causing it to direct its eyes upward, elevates and sanctifies it. Parsimonious trainer of the forces of love, it preserves them always fresh and always young; and when the first kiss causes the first virgin flower to fall from the brow of a woman, modesty brings forth new and ever virgin flowers before the steps of the two lovers. Texture that conceals, glass that covers, balsam that stops every putrescence, modesty is the most powerful preserver of the affections; and, perhaps, more loves are killed by immodesty than by infidelity.

If the sentiment of modesty were not a great virtue, it would be the most faithful companion of voluptuousness, the greatest generator of exquisite joys. An ardent thirst and an inebriating cup! What joy, but what danger of satiety! Now the cup is full, foaming with lust; the lips are burning and half open to the most voluptuous kisses of the sweet liquor; but the cup is held by the hands of modesty, who with the suavest art satisfies the thirst and renews it, so that the lips eternally remain half open and thirsty, and in the chalice the liquor will last forever. Admirable prodigy of an immense wealth, which finds in itself the sources of renovation and perpetuation; stupendous spectacle of the most gigantic of forces confided to the hands of a child who guides and governs it!

We should teach modesty to our children, and above all to our little girls, as clearly as possible, and refine it, so that it may be all sincerity and delicacy, and not a conventional hypocrisy.

We may be chastely nude, and we may be cynically immodest with the body as fully covered as an onion. We teach our young girls to lower their eyes before the glance of him who seeks and desires them, and then we take them to the theater, where the ballet-dancers are more than nude from the waist down and the ladies are nude from the waist up; so that, adding together the two immodest halves of the two very different classes of women, we may easily have one woman, all nude and all immodest. We teach our daughters to conceal even the foot from the eager eyes of man, and then we trust them to the hands of the dressmaker, that she may perfect with her sartorial art the too modest curves allotted by nature, and mould in an alluring way the contours which innocent youth still left chaste and modest. True Tartufes on a reduced scale, with one hand we hide our face, while with the other we go on exploring lasciviousness. As long as this profound hypocrisy continues to penetrate into the marrow of our modern society, modesty, too, will not be very sincere or will be able to exercise only the weakest influence toward elevating and refining our loves; nor do I know whether, with all the unchaste chastity that forms our distinction, we are entitled to class ourselves proudly among the modest nations. If it be true that hypocrisy is a homage paid to virtue, let us wait until the epoch of transition is past, and we shall then feel that we really are as virtuous as we pretend to be.

CHAPTER V THE VIRGIN

Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.

Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still seemed little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when your "yes" is answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for defeat,—there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you: "There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, because the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!" And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of voluptuousness.

And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!—mine for the first time!—mine forever!" Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison, in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.

There is a unit for all the series, there is a virgin for all human things: to be the first means to be vastly different from being the second. Now, nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical fact that tremendous unit which is called the first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous, avaricious, gives thanks to Nature for having come and borne testimony to the purity of a woman, and blesses her for having known how to bind a covenant of faith which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Longobards used to give the morgincap to the bride immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, the prize of virginity, often equaled the fourth part of the husband's estate. Some shrewd spouses (adds the malicious historian) had the good sense of stipulating beforehand the conditions of a gift which they were too sure of not deserving. However, although we are not Longobards, we promise to all our young girls a morgincap to induce them to guard intact, until the supreme day of the official first love, the sacred will. This morgincap is a husband; it is the esteem, the veneration, the adoration of all. With that veil intact, you are a saint, a virgin, an angel; the goal of all desires; you may entertain the most foolish ambitions; you may become a queen tomorrow. If that flimsy veil is rent, you are young, beautiful, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a human female. The temple has been violated, the idol overthrown, the priests have fled, hurling anathemas and invoking the vengeance of their god upon the head of the victim. What a tangle of mysteries and injustices! I really feel as if I were in the world of exorcism and necromancy!

The poet finds not one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, the destinies of the lives of future beings marked from the first kiss, all spasm and sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its crepuscules one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world: such is the virgin of the poet.

And the moralist, too, finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The protection of virtue consecrated by a material defense, a kind admonition that love will lead us to a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the bride given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious pledge of future faith, of everlasting domestic happiness,—there is the virgin of the theologian.

But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet and scoffs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ must have its function; every effect must have its cause; every "why" must be answered by a "because." The virgin is for me an inceptive angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still brutally coupled in us: the organs of love and the organs of a bodily function. The more the living beings elevate themselves, the more they subdivide their labors; and in a creature higher than we, love will certainly have a determined and reserved ground. From the "cloaca maxima" we have arrived at two smaller ones; a step further, and we shall have three organs and three apparatus; one of the greatest physical disgraces of our body will be eliminated.

A virgin is a creature who does a great deal more of good than evil, and very few among the men, if asked to vote for or against her, would blackball her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical of them would side with us. Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery and a sanctum sanctorum help to elevate and revive idolatry. And is not love the greatest of idolatries?

A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love us much, or at least she must desire an embrace much, to descend from the pedestal of the idol and come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the vulgar ground of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, and the fascination of primitiæ, and of being the first teacher of the art of love, centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first embrace. Even the dreadful trepidation of finding the temple violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness, of which, at very short intervals, we sound the somber sorrows, the ineffable delights. And a woman, too, who knows that she is a virgin will fathom the immensity of her sacrifice, and if she has the fortune of finding it equal to the immensity of her affection she feels one of the greatest ecstasies that can vibrate simultaneously nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She had already given her heart and all her affections to her god; today she gives him the seal which attests the possession of her entire self; and divides with her companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires. An angel yesterday, she allows her lover to tear away her wings and becomes again a woman in order to be a wife, a friend, a mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns on the altar of love the niveous robe of the vestal and cries, sobbing with joy and sorrow: "I am thine, all thine! Is there anything more that I can give thee? Tell me and I will give it to thee. I have clipped my wings, that thou mayst carry me aloft on the wings of thy genius; I have burned my temple, that I may live only in the temple of thy heart; I have forsworn the religion of my dreams, that I may be nothing but thy companion. Do not deceive me; I was thy virgin, and I shall be only thy wife. Have an immense love, an immense sympathy for me!"

And yet, we must say it to cause some one who will read these pages to turn pale with animosity, there are men who dare accept the sacrifice of the virgin without any right to be priests of love. And there are men who bite and defile her with the slime of the viper. Miserable, a hundred times miserable wretches! Amidst tears of shame and humiliation, may the woman dream of an infinite adultery; may human dignity, insulted, avenge itself by making the man a cuckold a thousand times; may the profaned virgin reascend to heaven, hurling anathema at the sacrilegious profaner of the temple; may the jury of entire humanity rise with the full majesty of its omnipotence and spit in the face of the enervated who has dared to ask of heaven an angel and of man a virgin, and may a horde of sneering demons scourge him, tie him to the great pillory of ridicule and, in the loudest voice, proclaim him the most dastardly, the last among men!

The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the great inconvenience of being understood by all, so that the mass of the people, proud and happy to be able to solve a question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands, brutally throw upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of Brennus. Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle at will about purity of heart and the frontiers of virtue; for the common people there are but virgin women or violated women; and physics, with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry with its diameters, solve a problem over which the minds of many thinkers were hard at work. And from this point of view, a large part of civilized men are common people, and many who weep through tenderness of heart and soar very high, stop wondering in the presence of the brutality of a fact, acknowledge defeat and empoison their own lives, thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for their companion had already sacrificed at the altar of love.

Science openly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied forms, and may be lacking in women who never felt the breath of man. In my medical capacity, I have myself seen, with my own eyes, some little girls who were lacking that seal with which nature seems to consecrate the virgin; and as I contemplated the little creatures I was distressed by the thought that, though having kept virtuous and innocent, virtue would some day be unavailing for them in the presence of an ignorant and brutal man. In vain these poor girls will some day be as pure as an angel. And even when anatomy does not practise such an imposition upon a woman, a fall, a blow, a contortion may, in the most innocent way, break the fragile seal which for many is the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor is this all. Often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are words unknown in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious jest of a too precocious boy, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, may violate the palladium of anatomical virginity without dimming in the slightest degree the mirror of the heart; and later, when the mysteries of love shall be unveiled, the still chaste maiden may feel pure and proud of herself and raise her head high, not knowing that she does not possess the star of physical purity. How many domestic misfortunes have happened in this way! How many first nights of love have become infernal nights, and how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, when they should have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys!

How many existences have been cruelly empoisoned through the elasticity of a veil more fleeting than the cloudlet that dissolves under the first rays of the sun!

And all of you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and brutality pass your judgment upon hearts and virginity, have you ever thought of the thousand and one aggressions which a young, beautiful and courted woman must pass through, and that, before becoming a bride, she must struggle with her own ignorance and others' lechery, with the surprises of the senses and with the cunning artifices of lust? A moment of weakness, an instant of morbid curiosity, may dim but not stain the virtue of a woman who can be, before and after, as pure as rock-crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the largest diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all the woman, it is not all the virtue.

How many wretched women were never pure except in the maternal womb, and yet with studied lasciviousness and infinite art preserved intact the physical seal of virtue, through the lechery of a hundred lovers, and, full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage and weary of carnal lust, carried their virginity to the altar of the official first love! Beautiful treasure, indeed! A diamond fallen a hundred times into the mud and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem! A piece of flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body; a flower grown on a clod of earth in the midst of a fetid marsh! And men often picked that flower with sacred devotion and kissed it and adored it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who lacked only a seal, like a registered letter refused by the post-office clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing-wax. How often have I wept in wrath, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: "Preserve physical virginity!" How often have I cursed modern morals which teach the bride: "Above all, no scandal!" These, then, are the morals of this hypocritical century: "Virgin first, prudent afterward." There is the virtue of woman! An eye on the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: such is the perfect woman of our times!

The excessive, brutal and bestial importance given to virginity by modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; and many times virginity has had two, five, ten different editions, not all improved, but always correct and revised, while the idiotic mass of husbands and lovers have been tricked into applauding the new virtue, the purest virtue, heaven knows how acquired!

The debasement of this hypocritical time could not be more cynically avenged. Of the virtue of a woman you have an idea utterly physical and chemical. Now, this advanced civilization is all at your service; it manufactures a chemical and physical virginity for your convenience, and calls to its aid some acrobatism, hocus-pocus and natural magic. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Curse, then, the pure and holy woman whose heart is virgin, who never has loved, but to whom the Longobards could never have awarded the prize of the morgincap!

Virginity exists; it exists in the physical nature of the human female, it exists in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and end with an anatomical condition: it is also virtue. The anatomical fact must be accompanied by the moral fact; with the purity of which the senses are the judges, we want purity of heart, the adamantine transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of the civilized man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only with a knife. She is a creature whom no social mud has ever soiled; she is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who never belonged to any man. She knows no lasciviousness, no art of hiding vice under a shining varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure word, at a too ardent gesture, at an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin knows that she is all intact, because she, too, has had longings and desires, but has never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is pure, because no profane hand has ever penetrated into the sanctuary of her purity. She has not opened any part of her robe, any fissure of her heart, any tabernacle of her treasures. She is white as the snow of the Alps, on which no foot of marten and no wing of insect have ever rested; she is pure as the water which spouts from the granite in a cave never explored by human foot; she knows everything, or is ignorant of everything, but she blushes for wisdom as well as for ignorance, if only her heart pulsates faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because she is modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin and modest because she is a woman.

And you, mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a treasure virginal purity is, give them, together with a lesson of anatomy and physiology, which perhaps they need, a lesson of high morals. Tell them that to the man they love they should give everything; to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that a woman can be physically a virgin and a prostitute morally; tell them that to the first kiss they owe all their treasures untouched, not one gem only, and that the future of their love will depend on the preservation of the centuple virginity enclosed in the one virgin as the masses conceive her. If nature, with a sad mystery, has prescribed that woman should love her first love with much pain, it is incumbent on us to crown the virgin with so many flowers of virtue, to scent her with so many perfumes of grace, as to turn a martyr into a happy spouse. It is our task to elevate the physical virgin to a very high region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us like an angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined by the iridescent light of the rainbow, where, amidst tears of a first defeat, should shine the light of the sun of love; and that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the bright calm of a day all beauty and delight. The Christian religion, in offering to man a virgin-mother to worship, wished, perhaps, to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the bride; to create an ideal of perfection in which the two chief virtues of woman should shine; to suggest, perhaps, that one can be a virgin and a mother, as another can be a virgin and a courtesan. That this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle or a myth, will be clearly proved by the influence which she has exercised upon Christian art, by gazing at the Madonnas of Raphael, of Murillo and of Correggio.

CHAPTER VI CONQUEST AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS

If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal; if he can be called the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast of having had from nature the largest cup at the banquet of voluptuousness; he can also boast of being able, alone among the living creatures, to die of pleasure and to end his life with lasciviousness. Certainly, a tremendous thing is the embrace of a man and a woman who love each other! So tremendous that, before this hurricane of the senses, the painter lets the brush fall from his hand, the physiologist loses the thread of analysis, and the philosopher is bewildered by the ferocious grandeur and the brutish sublimity of that act, in which every human force seems to be offered as a holocaust to animal fecundation. The avowed or secret aim of every love, the dream of every virgin and rage of every lust, the torment and delight of every man, voluptuousness is the greatest pleasure of the senses; but it is also the deepest abyss into which vulgar loves fall at every step, and where the great ones too are submerged. Voluptuousness! Tremendous word that recalls the most ardent scene of life and the greatest chaos, which concentrates wherever an organism is born or destroyed; formless chaos, from which flashes radiate and where elements quiver and earthquakes rumble and thunder; chaos in which good and evil are so near as to mingle, confuse and melt together; chaos in which angel and brute join in close embrace, and human individuality vanishes for a moment to give way to a fantastic monster, half man and half woman, half god and half demon; chaos from which a man is born, just as from another chaos arose the cry that generated light. I open the book of human deeds and read:

"In Sardinia the San Luri belle killed with her exuberance of carnality the young King Martin II. of Sicily, of the House of Aragon, him who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia, subjecting to his dynasty that part of the island which was still free. In 1409 he had gained a splendid victory over Brancaleone Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he himself was defeated in turn by the belle of San Luri, who, modern Judith, killed the Aragonese king with the fury of her kisses." ("La Marmora, Itinerario in Sardegna," etc., p. 270.)

"The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the theatre, Procopius adds: ἁναπεπτωκυἱα [Greek: anapeptôkuia]. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of nature, wishing a fourth altar, on which she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his wife and called her a gift of the Deity." (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.")

"The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by the spirit of many young women." (Bible.)

These few examples will be sufficient to delineate in a general way the frontiers within which human voluptuousness struggles, an insatiable author of so much good and so much evil. And yet, in the eyes of science it is nothing but "the most powerful of chemical affinities comprehended by the most perfect of living brains." Prepared in the slow laboratory of a man and a woman, the gemmulæ of life intensely seek each other and are reciprocally attracted; and when love gathers them by millions and millions, they kiss and join and, quivering, restore one of the most prodigious equilibriums of nature and generate a man.

If it is true that at every second a leaf detaches itself and falls from the human tree, it is most true that in the same unit of time ten existences at least are fused in order to relight the torch of life; and if all the gigantic forces which are condensed in those aggregations could be summed up, they would certainly be sufficient to send the world through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, on the soft cushions of new-mown hay and on the glaciers of the Sorata; on the swift train and on two camels crossing the desert, within the damp walls of the prison and in the deep mines where the rays of the sun never penetrate, in the forest and on the sands of the sea-shore, wherever a man and a woman find themselves near and can desire each other, voluptuousness wreathes its garlands and says to the man and the woman: "Be gods for an instant!"

There is no love without voluptuousness, but voluptuousness alone is not love, as that is not love which is ridiculously termed platonic. Lust and platonic love are maladies or monsters of love and are possible, nay, even too prevalent, like the deaf-mutes, the lame, the deformed, the giants and the dwarfs.

There is no conquest without possession of the thing conquered, just as there can be no love without voluptuousness. Take the flower from the tree, the fruit from the flower, and you will have a faithful image of all those amorous reticences which hypocritically stop at the threshold of the temple and, incapable alike of chastity and courage, of vice and virtue, drag a wretched existence in the limbo of bastardly affections. Often duty must be stronger than love, and, the principles of honesty forbidding, love must be conquered with a cruel and incredible torture; but it is better to be heroes of duty than brigands acquitted for lack of proofs, often despised, despicable always. If you truly love, if you can love, then love in the name of the most powerful of the gods of Olympus, love in the name of nature, in the name of the most sacred of rights. Leave aside all amorous casuistry, the worst of human hypocrisies; leave aside the hope of winning with your reticences and your compromises with conscience the Goliath of the sentiments. How many have I beheld, after long sentimental tirades on platonic love, and after bitter tears and vows of virtue, sink from hypocrisy into hypocrisy and down to lasciviousness! How many guilty lovers did not wish sin and had vice, did not wish guilt and had prostitution! All or nothing: such is love's command. Break down the tree that you cannot cultivate, be everything to somebody; demand to be everything to your companion; do not try to divide the indivisible; do not attempt to overthrow the omnipotent, to win over the invincible. With love you cannot jest; any compromise is impossible.

Voluptuousness, even in its purest and simplest forms, without love is always lasciviousness; it is immoral even when it seems hygienic. With love, even lust is virtue; and the studied casuistry of theologians is more immodest than the most ardent kiss ever exchanged between two lovers educated by a long experience of embraces. Voluptuousness is as penetrating as light, as inexhaustible as the sun, and, enclosed between two infinities, one of desire and the other of languor, it will never be all known by the human family, were it to live for millions of centuries. All forms of the beautiful are conquered by the blandishments of art; all forms of virtue are the delight of the sentiment of the good; every great and true idea is the joy of our thought; but voluptuousness relishes simultaneously all the joys of the senses, of sentiment and of intellect, calms all morbosities, extinguishes all fires, intoxicates itself with all inebriations, high and low, with all languors, all human flashes. Voluptuousness is a light which gilds every object it strikes and encircles it with a halo of celestial iridescence. Nor is the embrace of love alone voluptuous; for voluptuousness is in every contact of quivering robes, of glossy hair; voluptuousness is in every quiver of the skin, in every shock of the nerves, in every kiss of the flesh. Unfortunate he who has tasted voluptuousness only out of the one cup of Venus! Let him take lessons of woman, wisest teacher of every exquisite and sublime sensuality. A Bœotian in art, let him go to Athens and study the beautiful. There is no worse enemy of voluptuousness than lust, no sister more faithful than chastity. If the poet, the painter, the sculptor could conceive this divine group, "the joy of Love guided by the hand of Chastity," that representation, whether due to pen, brush or chisel, would be as holy a thing as an altar, a lesson in virtue and a great work of art; fire enclosed in alabaster, the sun abducted by the wave, enamored and jealous; Hercules led by a child!

Lovers who love and possess each other, lovers whom voluptuousness inebriates every hour, if you still have an instant to devote to prudence, remember that voluptuousness should not be the bread but the wine of love; that if you wish that your lips be eternally thirsty, your voluptuousness must be chaste and modest; you must swim, but not drown; you must quiver, but not fall into convulsions; you must be in the grasp of death, but not dead. Modest voluptuousness, this priceless treasure, was given by nature to woman, that she may restore it to you with unbounded joys; and you should respect it as a palladium of domestic happiness and nurture it in your daughters, because verily I say unto you that in modern society there is often more pudicity in the lowest of courtesans than in some married women whose nuptial education has been imparted by an aged and libertine husband.

CHAPTER VII HOW LOVE IS PRESERVED AND HOW IT DIES

The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the brute for which love is a desire that rises, is satisfied and falls asleep. If his affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic and intermittent love which dies every time a need is satisfied and revives with every renewed desire. The stimulus of the flesh announces in him the dawning of sentiment, and the obesity of the flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may have the same person or another as its object: this is for him a secondary and merely accidental question, and, according to the manner in which circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems this is the way in which many dark-skinned nations love, as well as many white-skinned men, who nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a necklace of Venetian beads, to which a new bead is added for every desire satisfied; and if the hues of the glass corpuscles are not too diverse, one may have before his eyes a pretty ornament that may spangle the neck of a decent virtue and an honest passion. Between the desire that dies and another that is born, you can set a gentle remembrance of gratitude for the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of a greater joy for the future; and the garland of your passion will then acquire greater beauty and new flowers and perhaps stimulate a true and great love. The most sublime heights of sentiment, the summits of thought, are reached by few; while hundreds and hundreds of lowly sheep ruminate on the plains, where thousands and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions and millions of ants are swarming. Upon the sapphire summits of the Alps two lone eagles represent the world of the living.

Love, although a most powerful affection, always follows the laws of elementary physics, which govern all the energies accumulated in our nervous centers and which we call sentiments. As long as passion remains in a condition of desire, that is to say, as long as force is potential and is not turned into a product, energy lasts and sentiment lives, vigorous and ardent. All the art of preserving love is, therefore, reduced to this alone: to preserve desire and to cause it to spring up again almost immediately after it is spent. And as even love, with all its omnipotence, cannot evade the physical laws, and every spark that springs forth must always be followed by a period of repose, it is indispensable to act in such a way that while a part of the force is transformed into labor, another be accumulated, preparing a new spark in such a short time that it should be nearly impossible to perceive any interval between the two sparks. To transform the intermittent electric current into a continuous one constitutes the great secret of protracting the existence of love.

As long as desire is not satisfied, and the struggle has not become a conquest, love is not only preserved but increased; and not in vain does woman provide for her happiness in asking for time and prolonging the battle. A love must be either very weak or very brutal if it withdraws from the struggle before victory; and as it happens very seldom that a woman yields everything at once, the small and great favors which from time to time she concedes to the conqueror mark a continual renewal of ever ardent desires and a continuous revivification of love. Finally, sooner or later, the day of the wished-for victory arrives, and one embrace makes two lives one, melts in a single crucible two volcanic rocks and two feelings of voluptuousness. However, even when love is so base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it seldom dies with the first embrace. And who can say that he has possessed a woman entirely in one night of love? Human charms are such and so many, and our esthetic needs so exquisite and ardent, that even the acquisition of voluptuousness alone is, fortunately, very slow, and in the sweet occupation of new provinces love is preserved or revivified. The various treasures of beauty and sensuality of two lovers, the art of loving, so neglected even after Ovidius' times, mark the limit of duration of those loves that derive their energies only from the worship of form or from the ardor of voluptuousness; and if in some cases that duration is long-lasting, it never is infinite. The hour comes when, alas! the wing of time smites the fresh cheeks of youth, and the northern winds wrinkle them, and the storm scatters over the ground the rosy petals of human beauty; the hour comes when the cup of lust no longer contains a drop of nectar, and then, if nothing is left, love is dying, and no miracle in the world can save it from a certain death. The energy of passion had its only source in voluptuousness and beauty; one has vanished, the other one is withered and the strength is spent. No force in the world is produced without the transmutation of matter; no energy is increased without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinities. If man and woman do not revive an affinity of sympathy, no combination can take place; no light, no heat can spring forth from their contact. Let them sing the psalms of death and together bury the remains of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, was inexorably to perish with it.

This is the most general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their life can be calculated with fair precision by weighing the beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. Those loves may last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they may, in rare cases, last for the entire period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the blows of time, and with incredible art repair the ravages of age; and not only are forms daily adulterated, denatured and counterfeited, but into the cup of love, as well, spices and drugs and philters are poured, that the silent hunger may receive the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and soft blandishments and morbid temptations of the flesh substitute the ardor and impetus of passion. Long lasts the battle before defeat is acknowledged and love changes its nature but still lives. It was a volcano, it is now a Bengal light; it was as nude and chaste as an Uranian Venus, it is now as clothed and immodest as a courtesan; it was love of every hour, it is now periodical, intermittent, like the tertian or the quartan; it impunely defied the rays of the sun at midday, it now prefers the twilight; but, when all is said, in spite of so much reticence and so much tinkering, it is still and always love. Women, you who behold with horror the gradual extinction of that fire which for so many years has warmed your enamored members, if you were happy through beauty alone, remember that that fire will be extinguished with the withering of the last attraction of your body; and when the heartrending cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire will not be answered, prepare for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire in the flaccid flesh of your lover, love will not be dead. You see, then, to what a low level the art of preserving love has sunk, when love has its origin only in the desire of bodily form: it sinks to a question of hygiene; I would nearly say, it transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy and preservation by chemical process! It is necessary to study the antiseptic virtue of deliberate refusals and libertine reticence; to submit lust to a chemical research and fatigue to a physiological investigation; to meditate upon the economy of energies and visit the pharmacy for the purpose of discovering the aphrodisiacal virtues of the various silken fabrics, of the various smiles, and of the sensual movements of the body. To these basest studies we have lowered the woman who would so gladly have wished to soar aloft with us through the numberless spheres of the beautiful and not only embrace the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought.

You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love, impossible, therefore, to reach; you will tell me that a man with a good constitution can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that woman, too, is entitled to thirty years of beauty and ten more years of gracefulness; so that a love which should last but these thirty or forty years would still be a most beautiful and most enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years, ending with a mild autumn, in which a sweet remembrance, a suave reciprocal gratitude, and an intimate friendship prepare the last twilight of old age, may seem to us a worthy triumph of a long and splendid life of love. And I am with you if you mean the common loves of the common people; but we must have a high, a very high aim, and we all should desire a love lasting as long as life and which shall be buried alone in its grave. And then every healthy man can offer to woman the thyrsus of love, and every healthy woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women can be called beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and all the others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of form, shall they not love, can they not be loved? Certainly.

In man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end with the exterior form, nor should love spring from the source of voluptuousness alone. No deformity, no disease in him who would procreate men: this is hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and intellectual beauty, relieved only by a soft shade of sex, can and should awaken ardent and tenacious passions that do not vanish with the sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights to every man and every woman, perfect love should be born of the contemplation and adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form begins to fade, let moral beauty shine in all its power, and, later still, let the beauty of thought appear to us in all its brilliant majesty, so that while one star disappears, another twinkles, and from the slumbering desires of the senses we feel a stronger yearning awaken, the yearning for possessing the treasures of sentiment and thought of a creature who is all ours, and whom, if we suddenly loved her for the beauty of form, we now love and will continue to love for her beauty of kindness, culture, ideas, and everything that a human being can boast of beauty and greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type, and feminine kindness can be adored by us, just as virile courage is admired by the sweet and tender nature of woman. When we have loved in a woman not only the beautiful female, but a whole nature imbued with all the beauties and graces of the human Eve, the longest life will not suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at the last hour of extreme old age we have still some new conquest to make, and some desire is reawakened, while the accumulation of most sweet memories fills the void which youth, by fleeing, has left behind itself. Sublime triumph of human nature, in which love survives the senses exhausted, voluptuousness which is mute, the beauty of forms which is buried, while a warm ray of light shines on the silvery heads of two old beings who still love each other because they still desire each other and because heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual by origin, but ideal for the heights attained. Our study on love in old age will complete this picture, certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great museum of love: a picture which we should all desire to represent in the late years of our life.

When the sources of love are many, while one dries up another swells so that love never lacks a flow of water to quench its insatiable thirst. All passions follow in their movements a parabolic line, and those that have risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so close to strength; the tediousness that follows enthusiasm; the thousand dangers of the death of sentiment. More than any other passion, love presents these phenomena and dangers, and it is impossible for all to make voluptuousness, ecstasy and apotheosis last beyond a very short flash of a few instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable laws of the nervous system, and he who would increase enthusiasm and

"Only breathe the life of kisses and of sighs,"

dies consumed by his own fire, and, what is worse, before dying, beholds love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of nature, nor can we subjugate them; but it is conceded to us to direct them to our advantage. And thus it is in our case. Between ecstasy and ecstasy we can sow joy and suppress tediousness; between voluptuousness and voluptuousness we can suppress weariness and pick the flowers of sentiment, and from too ardent and sensual contemplations we can repair to the cool temple of thought to meditate and remember together. This is perfect love, this is ideal love, which keeps pure, unaltered, brilliant as a diamond in the tormented sand of a river. A few reach it; many, however, can approach it, and for human happiness and human greatness it is enough to see it even from afar, like the promised land, which, as the poet says, "is always beyond the mountain."

The man who brutally opposes the holy and noble aspirations of woman for a higher participation in mental work signs his own sentence; and when he cynically sends her back to the bed or to nursing cares, he resigns himself to knowing only the coarsest and most brutish part of the joys of love. You may be the strongest male and the wisest libertine; but Venus herself, descended from the heaven of the ideal, would tire you, and for you, too, would arrive the hour of dislike; then you would curse the vanity of love and execrate life, reciting the litany of lamentations and disappointments which, from Adam down, has been repeated by all those who know not how to love and are bestially ignorant of the laws of the economy of strength. We must elevate woman more and more in order not only to fulfil an act of justice but also to enlarge the field of our joys and increase the value of our voluptuousness. A great step has been made in this direction, by transforming the female of the polygamous gyneceum into the mother of a family; but this new "freedman" of modern civilization is merely tolerated, not considered equal to us, like an orphan taken from the street and living with the members of a family but not forming an integral part of it. If the concubine has become a mother, a great step still remains to be made in order that she may become a woman, or, to put it in a better way, become a female-man, a most noble and delicate creature, who shall think and feel as we do and think and feel in a feminine way, thus completing in us the aspect of things, of which we see only a part, and bringing to us, in the meditations and struggles of life, that precious element which only the daughter of Eve can give us. If from woman you want nothing but the joys of love, then sow sentiments and ideas in her. She is like the bee that changes sugar and nectar and the fluid of every flower into honey: make her wise, and wisdom will be transformed into caresses; make her strong, and she will use her strength to enrich you; make her great, and she will place her greatness at your feet for a kiss. Fear not; she will never place her foot upon the neck of man, because she loves him too much, and because, to become a tyrant, she would be compelled to amputate the better part of herself, abdicating her omnipotence.

Where man and woman are bound together by the three natures of sense, sentiment and thought, love is easily preserved by its own nature and without any need of artifice. Some fortunate individuals ask with astonishment why their love should ever cease; and love lives in them, warm, tenacious, invincible, and only with death is extinguished, instantaneously, like the porcelain bowl, very old but always new, which falls from the hands of the inexperienced servant and perishes as it was created, beautiful and brilliant.

It is not so when voluptuousness is all, or nearly all, of love; then the easiest way to preserve it is to keep always some drops of desire in the cup of love, so that, between embrace and embrace, voluptuousness is never quite extinguished, giving a deeply sexual character to the common relations of habits, conversations and family intercourses. This is an indirect but sure advantage, ever produced by chastity between two creatures that love each other without having the fortune to participate in any treasures beyond those of the senses. It is opportune to remember that every virtue is the fruitful mother of other virtues.

The preservation of love is one of the most sacred rights or duties incumbent upon woman, although we cannot refuse with impunity to take an active part in this mission. We, however, are too light-minded, too polygamous, too exacting in our sudden desires to find prudence and economy of love easy virtues for us. To see all, to touch all, to want all and at once: such is the childish appearance of many virile loves. Woman loves more than we, but she foresees, presurmises, fears. In love, too, she is a good provider, and, while she picks the flower for the joy of today, knows how to preserve the fruit for the dreary winter. Woe to her, if she joins in the thoughtlessness of her prodigal companion! They will make together a splendid bonfire of their affections, of their voluptuousness, renewing, alas! too soon, the thousandth edition of the story of the grasshopper and the ant.

If the women who will read my book should learn nothing but this one thing, I would believe that they have had a just compensation for the tediousness which they may have experienced; and I shall be happy for not having written in vain to promote the welfare of the dearer part of the human family. With the right given to me by a long and troublesome experience, by a deep, untired study of the human heart, I pray and entreat and conjure them to close with their white little hands and their rosy lips the lips of the man who too ardently begs their love. Let them say "no" and "no" again, and bury the "yes" of the friend under a shower of flowers, reserving the desire for other supplications and other battles. Every sacrifice will be compensated a hundredfold, and for a caress denied today, they will receive ten tomorrow. Woman is an old teacher of sacrifice, and let her use this practical wisdom in preserving love, which is the air she breathes, the blood which gives life to her, love which is her dearest treasure. Never should she say "yes" before having said "no" at least once; if she truly loves the prodigal friend, she should save for the days of famine the crumbs which now fall from his hands and which today he despises; let her be the stewardess of love as she already is that of the household; let man fecundate and woman preserve; let him conquer and let her keep the booty.

If genital chastity is the virtue which, better than any other, preserves vulgar loves, a certain chastity of sentiment and thought, a certain reserve of manner and forms are also indispensable if sublime loves are to last. The man must never see his wife nude, nor should the woman ever behold her companion nude before her; veils and mists, leaves and flowers must shade the man and woman in sense, sentiment and intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never tires of loving, contemplating, studying, just because it is neither weighed nor measured. And so it is in love: the beautiful, the true, the good of the creature whom we love must be infinite, because they must not be seen, weighed or measured by us. A sun that passes from the crepuscule of the morning to the evening twilight and never entirely reveals itself: such is eternal and immutable love, that fears no frost of winter or hurricanes of summer; that dies standing like the ancient heroes.

Study the fortunate men who are not only capable of arousing, but also of preserving great passions, and you will behold in them all those exalted virtues which may be grouped under the name of crepuscular politics. A beauty that has more grace than splendor, more seduction than heat; a flexibility that retains strength; an authority that can be made to smile, and a nature that is smiling rather than laughing; a deep and tender kindness, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur: such are the great preservative powers of love. Grace more than beauty preserves love, because it has more crepuscular hues; sympathetic natures more than beautiful ones preserve love, kind natures more than grand ones, wit more than genius. There are men and women who at first sight do not make any great impression, but on every hair of their head they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a leech, so that no sooner have you come into intimate contact with them than you find yourself seized by a thousand grapnels and absorbed by a thousand cupping-glasses, as though a gigantic polyp had seized you in the absorbing coils of its manifold tentacles.

Love is dead without possibility of resurrection when, unlike all living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the slumbering nerves, no wave of blood to rouse the heart. But love also has swoons and syncopes and, like the rotifer, may die provisorily and desiccate, awaiting a beneficial rain to restore it to life. Whoever denies this virtue in love, then believes that love is baser than the rotifer and has never known the most elementary physiology of life and affection. There is for love, as for any other organism, a real death and an apparent one; the former is inexorable, the latter curable, like any other malady, by having recourse to skill and knowledge.

How often has a love apparently dead resuscitated as live as ever, probably more alive than before; and this, heralded as a miracle, is one of the usual mysteries of the heart, for life was not extinguished, but only latent, as no dead, really and truly dead, with the exception of Lazarus, has ever been seen to rise again. A nerve was still sensitive, a desire could still be resuscitated, and the apparently dead comes to life again. Physicians remark that apparent death is much more frequent in cases of hysteria, catalepsy and in all forms of neurosis; it is then natural that many loves, alive but believed to be dead, have been interred through a most cruel mistake, since an organism more nervous, more cataleptic and more hysterical than love is difficult to find in the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the burial is less dangerous, because love itself opens every coffin, every grave, overturns every clod and appears to you saying: "Do not weep; here I am!"

Very rarely does love die a violent death, and cases called by that name are wounds, ruptures, syncopes and nothing more. Real death occurs through senility and after long illness. Duty frequently commands not to love him or her who suddenly has seemed base and infamous to us; but love, sentenced to death, weeps, despairs, but does not want to die. Sent back to prison, without light, without food, it defies hunger, darkness, cold, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believes that it has disappeared from the face of the earth, as has happened with illustrious prisoners plunged into the stillness of a castle; but love lives in those depths and groans, convulsed by a prolonged agony, until at last, with him who feels it, it dies a merciful death.

If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill love violently, it is because it was not true love; and if it really were such, the battle will be relentless and long, and the Prince of Affections will die, as in other cases, a lingering death. When we shall once and forever have ceased to call love that which is the desire of the flesh and the pride of possession, that sentiment will appear to us as a much more beautiful thing, greater and more honorable than is ordinarily supposed; many miracles will at last be explained as very simple physical phenomena, and many obscure mysteries will be exposed to light.

To cause love to gush forth from the rock of indifference is a fascinating prodigy; to rouse it from its slumber is a desirable power; to sow the path of our life with love and desires may be the splendid pride of every living creature; but to cherish the conquered love, to preserve it pure and bright, to bring it impunely through the cyclones of life, the fogs of November and the frost of December, to guide it, healthy and robust, from the spring of youth to the border of the grave that it may die, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration and adorned with flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest ambitions to which we can aspire. It is as beautiful a thing as to create a work of art; it is as useful an achievement as to become rich; it is as great a feat as to reach glory. It is said by many that the most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into friendship; but several times already I have made clear to the reader what I think of sexual friendships. Perhaps, in some very rare cases, neither of the two lovers remembers that the beloved one belongs to the other sex: but how can the loves of the entire past be forgotten? How can we suddenly obliterate the ardent remembrances of the many years of love? If for a dead love the sweet custom of friendly visit can be substituted, if a man and a woman can forget that they are man and woman, what name will this new and singular affection deserve? Perhaps that of automatic habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the laboratory of the physiologist, that he may study it together with the unconscious and reflected motions.

CHAPTER VIII THE DEPTHS AND THE HEIGHTS OF LOVE

Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is love, which always seems to live between two infinities, height and depth. While its aspirations carry it aloft, while it seems to ask of heaven space and light, it projects its roots into the most intricate mazes of the rocks, into the most somber mysteries of the abyss. Star that glitters in the infinity of the ideal, root that dissolves the stones in the infinity of depth, it reaches all altitudes and all profundities, is the most human of passions and always placed among the divine passions; it is inmost in us and the most ethereal. Thought on the summit of a mountain, strength in the valley below, it guides the poet when he ascends to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into the hot sea of sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse on earth. If to live means to exist in the most beautiful form of life, then love is richness, luxury, splendor of life; love is whatever is divine in human beings.

No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it lifts the bottom of human nature, where pearls and corals are intermixed with mud. It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things and reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before conceived; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators. How many simple natures of young girls, how many vulgar talents of men are perturbed, agitated and renovated by the contact of the new god, who seems to evoke from the abysses all silent passions, all dormant ideas, all the phantoms of heart and thought! The deep simmering of psychical elements at the contact with love almost always announces the birth of a second moral nature and, revivifying life, marks a new era in it. Of our birth we are always ignorant, and of our death almost always unconscious; between the "to be" and the "not to be" only one third and great thing is possible—"to love." While the common people judge from the hair on the face and from the deepened voice that a boy has become a man, a tremendous profound earthquake warns him that he must love, that he already loves; and while mothers behold with affectionate trepidation the rounding of their daughters' form to womanhood, another profound earthquake warns the girl that she must love, that she already loves.

In the loving season many animals change color and shape, adorn themselves with new feathers, or arm themselves with new weapons; with the nuptial robe they assume different habits and singular abilities; mutes, they become clever singers; obtuse, they are transformed into skilled architects; granivorous, they become carnivorous; if the earth is their habitat, they become winged messengers of the skies; if caterpillars, they are metamorphosed into butterflies. So it is with man, although such transmutation hardly affects his epidermis, but sinks into the veins and the meanders of his physical nature. The phase of puberty deserves to be dealt with separately; it will suffice here to remark that every force redoubles, every vigor refines, and while, with our growing to manhood, forces and energies prepare and grow, love calls forces and energies into action. Puberty declares us in a state of war; love calls us to the battle. Defenseless if we have not reached puberty, we are armed if we have reached it; armed and combative if we have reached it and are in love.

Not all human forces are good, not all the resources of mind are beneficial to the good, and, therefore, love calls into action bad elements as well, which had not been seen before. For the first time, from the deep abysses of the moral man, specters of crime and vice, phantoms of revelry and prison appear. In defective organisms, predestined for the prison or the madhouse, together with first love often the first crime or the first mania reveals itself. To the great summoner of profundity and sublimity every human element answers, "Present"; and the sudden anger in natures erstwhile mild, the first tears on faces till then smiling, the first poetic outburst in natures hitherto utterly prosaic, the first hysterical paroxysms in a body that seemed to have no nerves, the first ambitions in the most timid youth, the first meditations at the mirror, the first impulses, the first war declared against an invisible enemy, the first follies, the first flashes of genius, the first lies and the first heroisms, are all new specters called from the abysses by the magic wand of the sorcerer among sorcerers, by the greatest conjurer of spirits that the blessed age of wizards and exorcisms might have boasted of.

The man who loves is twice a man, because for the first time he feels not only that he is alive, but also that he has the power of creating living beings, of procreating. Nor is woman the sole generator, because in man's blood is half of a future creature, and the seed of a second existence within us doubles us and makes us almost as proud as the ancient prophets, to whom God entrusted, as to a tabernacle, the supreme truth, the prophecy of future events. A man who loves has within him a part of that which will live in the future, the fruitful germs of a new generation.

While all the psychical forces are still confused and indistinct at first contact with the new sentiment, Love will march them in procession and muster them under his orders. Every beauty must transmute itself into flowers for a garland, every passion must lend its fire, every energy must don the livery of a servant or a slave. Many to serve, one to command; many strong, but only one supremely strong; many subjects, but only one tyrant. No objection, no discussion; where love is present, who would give suggestions or counsel? O virgin and rising forces of youth, bow your head before your god; splendid beauties of human nature, lay your tributes upon the new altars. Are you not satisfied with the glory of doing homage to love? Rarely does avarice find place in the first and deep meditations of a heart in love, but the question is continually repeated: "Have I something else, something better, to offer? Have I really given my whole self to my king?"

A most singular and heartrending voluptuousness of love is to feel that everything leaves us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems as though we were witnessing a satanic phantasmagoria in which we behold limbs, organs, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running madly toward a new center, where a new organism is being moulded with our remains. Even time appears to be ours no longer, since it is no longer measured by the watch, but by the impatience of desire or the flashes of voluptuousness; thought, too, no longer belongs to us, as it is tyrannically ruled by one image alone. To find ourselves again, to remember that we have still intimate relations with the man of yesterday, we must go and seek another creature who has robbed us of everything. Hence a vague unrest which invades the body, the senses and the thoughts of every lover; hence the undertaking, most difficult even for the ablest dissembler, to conceal the new god who invades and penetrates every part of us. Every hair, every pore, every nerve, every part of the epidermis of the man who loves sings and says to the universe of the living: "I love, and who loves me?" Day and night, in the calm and in the storm, all the nature of a lover sings its note until another song responds in the same tone. Not a moment of peace, not an instant of truce, until the new energy has found a sister energy. Love is like the sea: here it is as calm as the surface of an Alpine lake, still and smooth as a sheet of lead; but there, among the rocks or upon the coast, it is eternally in motion, and, roaring or sighing, howling or caressing, agitates with incessant motion the land it kisses. Man and woman who meet and love are the sea and the land, which are perpetually at war—a war in turn sweet and bitter, tender and cruel, voluptuous and merciless.

Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of white linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to her work! She seems, between one stitch and another, to be meditating on the solution of the quadrature of the circle, so absorbed is she in her arduous task. But if I only could write the volume of thoughts that pass through her brain between two stitches! She is fishing in the deep abysses of love.

And at a short distance thence, she unaware of it, a young man, too, is at the window, his hair disheveled, his hands firmly thrust into his pockets, his breast swelling as by a threat. He has been staring at the sky for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous problem of the proletariate or on that of human liberty? Is he, perhaps, dreaming of glory, of wealth? No; he, too, is fishing in the deep abysses of love.

Woman more than man dives deeper and soars higher in the regions of love; society generally withholds her from the field of action, and an infinite time is left to her for penetrating into the abysses of the heart. How often an innocent young girl, who, perhaps, hardly knows how to write, for many long hours feels in her imagination the sweetness of a kiss which lasted but a second; how often she is tortured during a whole night by the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word! Here is a deepness of sense which, nevertheless, is nothing in comparison with the queer and transubstantial process of sentimental analysis with which woman pulverizes, analyzes, distills a look, a word, a gesture. Hide, O chemists, your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical art of an enamored woman; to her the spectroscope is a coarse instrument of prehistoric science; homœopathic draughts are poisons; atoms are worlds; she has measured them many centuries before Thomson. A billionth part of a milligram of rancor diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is detected by her process of analysis; an atom of indifference in the lava of desire is instantaneously traced by the thermo-electric apparatus which she uses in her laboratory. She is a priestess of the ideal, of the infinite, of the incommensurable, and will continue to be religious many centuries after man will have buried the last god. Even in love, the infinite is insufficient for her.

Love always elevates the lover above the average man; and as his increased strength makes him capable of greater undertakings, the horizon widens before him more and more because he sees men and things from a greater height. Each one of us has a different capacity of soaring to the regions of the ideal; but rabble and genius, prose and poetry, always raise themselves, by the action of love, to a world which is nobler, more beautiful, more serene than that in which we drag out our daily uneventful existence. How many vulgar, despicable natures are redeemed by the action of love; how many inert intellects are guided through the paths to glory; how many of the vulgar herd reach the height of the Olympus of thoughts with the aid of a loving hand! And still the ignoble proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard against love as against a bitter enemy, and the examples are pedantically quoted of great men who loved but art and to chastity alone owed their greatness. Strange disorder of ideas, in which hygiene is confused with morality, chastity with the incapacity of loving; but a man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated by love, if he does not make an unworthy creature the object of his affection, if he does not confound love with lust. For one genius killed by love, you have a hundred who owe to love their greatest inspirations, who drew from it the strength to live, who blessed it as superior to glory, who in it alone found the fresh wave that tempered the burning ardor of enthusiasm and passion. It is an old habit of the human beast to trample under its feet the rind of the fruit from which it has just sucked the last drop of juice!

If love does not work in all creatures the same miracles which we expect, if it is not always a virtue that elevates and refines, it is because we have lowered woman to the level of our lasciviousness, because even we, civilized men, feel for her more desire than esteem, more lust than love. And yet woman thirsts more than man for the ideal, and, like all oppressed creatures, looks upward with more faith. Her exquisitely sensitive nature, open to the raptures of enthusiasm, easily inflamed by the warmth of poetry, attracts her irresistibly to higher and higher altitudes, and she would have helped us also to soar if we had not made of her a sweet concubine or a good housewife. Woman feels the ideal, aspires to every sublimity, but she has neither courage nor strength to ascend; and if she is not supported by the robust arm of her lover, she will become easily prostrated and sit down to rest on the path that leads upward. To her nature has assigned the task of indicating the high aim, to us the duty of accompanying and sustaining her. In a magnificent painting by Schoeffer, Dante is standing below, Beatrice above. Dante gazes at her, contemplates her and is inspired by her; and Beatrice, her eyes turned to heaven, seems to say to him: "Upward, upward! There it is where we shall go together!" Nothing is more contagious than enthusiasm; nothing more fascinating, more irresistible than the enthusiasm of woman. Without arguments that induce one to believe, without the strength of hoping, sustained only by love, she is always full of faith in great and beautiful things, and at every step of life, now handsome by her sublime imprudence, now affecting by her youthful enthusiasm, seems to say to us: "Onward, onward!" And with her tender little hands she draws us upward, guides us and lends us her ever fresh strength, even when she would appear fatigued.

When Christ made faith the corner-stone of his religion, when he said that with faith we could move the mountains, he was inspired, perhaps, by that ardent faith which woman is possessed of and which makes her strong in her weakness. Woe to us, if before preparing for an undertaking we should be obliged to weigh with mathematical precision all favorable and unfavorable probabilities; woe to us, if we were to launch only into those enterprises of which we are sure! More than three-fourths of the great achievements would never have been performed. There is always an element which evades calculation, and it is in the capricious hands of destiny; it is the lacuna which must be filled by faith, by that faith which lifts the mountains, and which woman so deeply feels and so tenderly infuses into our hearts. You may point at the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart, who, without the aid of woman, reached the prodigious heights of fame; but I most solemnly affirm that, had they been guided by a loving hand, they would have soared still higher. Love is a second sight, and woman sees things from a point of view which nearly always escapes the synthetic survey of man; she discovers many hidden elements of things which we, through excessive haste or excessive pride, do not see; and helping us with the light of love, she assists us in penetrating more deeply into the substance of every problem and, above all, into the knowledge of human nature. In small and great things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read the book of history and the book of the human heart, you should never fail to consult the woman who loves you; whether about a book, or a law, or a work of art, or commerce, or industry, or poetry, woman will always have something new to tell you, she will always have her revelations, and through the action of love you will feel elevated.

Some men of talent lack the coefficient of ambition to ascend, and you will often see them die before producing the fruit of their gigantic forces; only woman and love can give them that energy which they cannot obtain from the stimulus of self-love. Eve knows how to infuse faith into the skeptic, ambition into the disheartened, strength to all; unaspiring for herself, she is intensely ambitious, haughty, proud, if necessary, for the man she loves; and thrones and political power, civil and martial crowns, glories of art and science, were won through the ambition lent or inspired by a beloved woman. In heroic and chivalrous ages this was publicly proclaimed and boasted of; today, when women are sold in houses of prostitution or at the counter of matrimony, it has become fashionable to blush at owing one's glory to a woman, and the chivalrous element, alas! sank and perished together with many other evil things which we would not like to see come back again. Chivalrous love vanished and its place was taken by the cicisbeism of our great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of a new rising generation we feel that we begin to discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for the amorous life of man.

The more ballast love throws away which keeps it near to the ground, the higher we soar in the regions of the ideal. This ballast consists all of lust and self-pride, and it is woman's duty to help us throw it out of our car. She should not assist with her lasciviousness and her vanity in further debasing man's loves, already so brutish and vulgar. In the rapture we feel when inhaling the pure air of the loftiest mountains, we may sometimes forget that night is drawing near and home is far away; and thus in love we may feel so carried away by the fascination of the ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the matter. These are sublime derangements of the brain, only too rare, but reaching the extreme limits of human possibilities; they lead to delirium, to self-sacrifice; they drag us to folly or to martyrdom. If a desire continues durable and pure upon the highest summits of human love and is not perturbed by the contact of matter, men from beneath will contemplate that statue as a fantastic monument erected by the morning clouds of the mountain. Not knowing whether it is an effect of the mist or the imagery of a dream, they contemplate and admire.

The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing of the senses but two clasping hands and two pairs of eyes which blend together, is certainly a voluptuousness among the greatest of the sexual world; and without any need of platonic love, it may so happen that two creatures in that moment will forget that one of them is a man and the other a woman. Then feminine nature shines with all the halo of its celestial light; from that source of poetry, genius may draw its greatest energies. Then coarse natures undergo the influence of refinement in that pure air, social scrofula disappears and all human soil is washed off. Women, you should take advantage of those fleeting instants to regenerate the human family and urge it on to higher destinies! The influence of the ecstasy of sentiment on man is of shorter duration than on woman, and your angel will soon fall at your feet, imploring of you the kiss of the terrestrial creature. You are omnipotent then, for you have the lion at your feet; and if man is strong, you are stronger still, since his strength is all for you. Guide it toward the good and the better; direct it to the beautiful. In that lion which roars with a subdued voice at your feet there is still much of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the human brute. Silence the beast by running your slender fingers through his disheveled mane, summon forth from the depths holy energies, noble inspirations and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your sake; we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we desire the conquest, but only to place it at your feet. To every kiss of yours may the human family owe a great attainment; to every endearment of yours, a useful deed! May your love be the highest and dearest prize to every ambition! True, you are weak; but when you are desired you are very strong. Who dares assert that he is stronger than the "no" of a woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the finger of woman threatens and commands: "Stand back!"?

Woman sins at least four times less than man; she fears crime, she is horrified at the very thought of crime. Let us, then, disarm the man who too often wounds or strikes; let the coward find no woman who loves him, let him have no cup but that of the coarsest voluptuousness; let the ignorant, the debased, the social parasites, all the fiends of the moral world, find no bosom of woman on which to rest their heads! As the Church once would banish excommunicated persons, so that they could find no bread, no shelter, it should so be with moral monsters: let them be banished from the region of love! And the elect women, whom nature favored with the fateful gift of beauty, should preserve their treasures for the strong and the immortal; their smiles should be the crown of triumphing genius and magnanimous heart, for genius and beauty are the most sublime interlacement of human forces, one of the most splendid pictures of the nature of living beings.

Love, after having spread the minute fibrils of its tiny roots into all the deep fissures of the human world and absorbed every drop of liquor, every throb of energy, sends up to the branches of the robust tree every sap and every energy; and there, high in the air, leaves, flowers, and fruits drink from the rays of the sun the sweetest and most inebriating voluptuousness. There, in those regions full of light and heat, and which no worm of the soil, no atom of dust, no miasmatic exhalation ever attain, profundity becomes sublimity, and man and woman, blended in the ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and the good, ask of themselves: "And what is God?"

CHAPTER IX SUBLIME PUERILITIES OF LOVE

Like the butterfly, which, when just emerged from the involucre of the chrysalis, still bears on its folded wings some strips of the wrapping in which it was long enveloped, so Love, the youngest of human passions, carries remnants of the robe of childhood which he has just discarded. In his caprices and in his follies, in his games full of grace and strength, in his blind idolatries and in his childish sorrows, you would say that you behold before you a child genius. Now he surprises you with his violence, then he awakens your sympathy for his weakness; now all powerful, then most timid; now a hero, then a coward; today he defies heaven with closed fists; tomorrow he will with tears implore a caress. Love is childish because he is a child; childish because he is a poet; childish because, unleashing all the impulses of the moral world, and agitating in a convulsive kaleidoscope all the images of thought, he is more often lyric than epic, and writes more dithyrambs than stories, more poems than philosophical treatises.

Furthermore, Love is puerile because he is also so religious as to be superstitious and subject to all the nonsensical ideas that may pass through the brain of a timid and ignorant woman. Love, even in northern countries, delights in the pomp of the idolatry which is most characteristic of the south, protests against the severe worship of certain religious sects and, being a great admirer of churchly gorgeousness, demands incense, images, tinsel, altars, insignia, canopies and tabernacles.

No religion ever had more senseless idolatry than Love, no Olympus had more gods, more altars and more priests. He accepts every belief, every worship, from the fetish of the savage to the omnipotent, invisible God of nobler religions. Full of faith and fears, Love would himself have invented idolatry if this had not had an infinity of other roots to sprout from through the human brain.

When man feels, desires, loves very much, and has reached the furthermost boundary of the human field, he always erects an altar with the richest and most beautiful material at his command and there, on his knees, prays and adores; often he prays and adores at the same time. To that altar he brings the amber and the coral gathered on the sea-shore and the gold found in the sands of the stream, the poetry found in his erratic wanderings through the heaven of the ideal, the most beautiful flowers of his thought, and offers all as a tribute to a creature of earth or space, of nature or imagination. And to love, also, man erects his altar, at the furthermost boundary of the human world, and, on his knees, solemnly asserts that beautiful, good and holy above everything is the creature whom he loves. Not satisfied with this, he raises himself upon the altar and casts avidious glances into the darkness of the unknown, where no form appears to him but the expansion and the reflection of the rays of this world; and there he is suspended over the abysses of nothingness. In that darkness live all the infinities, all the gods, all the human loves carried into the farthest regions of the ideal.

To love, everything is holy that has been touched by the hand, the eye, or the thought of the beloved, everything in which the dear image is reflected. All these become an object of worship, all is transformed into a magic mirror in which we contemplate our god. Who does not remember the adoration for a rosebush from which she had plucked a flower, and the idolatry for a petal which she had scented; and who does not remember the thousand various and foolish relics of love?

In the reliquary of love have found a place the beautiful and the grotesque, the horrid and the graceful. I had a friend who used to weep for long hours with joy and emotion, kissing and contemplating a thread of silk which she had held in her hands, and which was for him the only relic of love. Another kept on his desk for long years the skull of his sweetheart as his dearest companion. There are those who have slept for months and years with a book, a dress, a shawl. And who can enumerate all the sublime puerilities, all the ardent tendernesses, all the insensate acts of the idolatry of love?

Sensations accumulate such mysterious and deep energies in the brain of man, that, at a sign from us, they can all spring up and erect an edifice before us, greater and more beautiful than the reality of things. No woman was ever as beautiful as the image which her lover sees in the calm of his solitary adoration, or pictures upon the black ground of a night of dreams, a comparison which would often be dangerous, if the magic brush of imagination did not also overcolor the beauty of the things seen by the eye and caressed by the hand; but it is a comparison, however, which often sows the lives of artists and poets with sorrow, delusions and even crimes.

If every beautiful woman could know all the kisses, all the caresses, all the hymns offered to her by the multitude of men who admire and desire her, she would certainly feel proud that she possessed the power of calling forth so many energies from the world of the living. Who knows where all those rays end, where the heat of so many motions accumulates, where such a scattered force gathers again? If it is true that nothing is lost of all that is generated, what transformation takes place in so many ardent desires that extend in the infinite void of space?

Modesty imposes a great sobriety of behavior on woman, often a tyrannical reserve. She conceals from our eyes the most intimate adorations, the revels of the heart and the strange hysterics of sentiment. We, always less enamored than she, give vent more freely to our effervescence; and if a beautiful and fortunate woman should describe the scenes which she has witnessed in her youth, she would present a collection of caricatures before which all others would grow dim and mawkish; a collection which would combine the grotesque with the sublime, folly with passion, impudent threats of death and impossible fasts; sudden abandonments of one's dignity, abdications of common sense, stupid sacrifices of one's own personality, orgies of fancy and hurricanes of the senses, humiliations worthy of a Franciscan friar and braggart rodomontades. How much misery, how many carnivals and bacchanalia, and how much baseness has woman to witness! Fortunately for us, she is merciful and modest; for our honor's sake, she covers us with a corner of her queenly mantle, hiding our puerilities from the eyes of the profane, and often from our own.

CHAPTER X BOUNDARIES OF LOVE, AND THEIR RELATIONS TO THE SENSES

A country cannot be surveyed without tracing exactly its boundaries, without following them in their capricious and serpentine lines, without marking the point where its individuality ends and the influence of the neighboring country begins to be felt. You may have trampled every clod; wandered through every path, scented the soil of every field, and drunk the water of every spring and every stream; but if you have not sketched the confines of a country, you know less than half its history. Everything is important for what it is and what adjoins it. Not one, then, in this world can impunely be near to another, and all things act and react reciprocally. So it is with love, which has frontiers as vast as the human world, as indented as the coast of Dalmatia or of Norway, capricious, irregular, changeable. It is a land which projects into all adjacent countries, and with it sense, sentiment and thought come into close and complicated contact.

Every sense, every passion, every force of the mind is an instrument of love; but this, in turn, bends in a thousand different ways to senses, passions and thoughts. It is a continual interlacing of factors and instruments, of causes and effects; and while this gigantic power warms and agitates the inmost fibers of the human organism, it radiates its penetrating light to the furthermost confines of the world.

Love, which by the supreme right of existence requires the contact of two different natures, which is but the kiss of two creatures who blend for an instant and fuse together the germs of their power, must have most varied, numberless relations to the sense of touch. It could even be said, without departing from strict scientific truth, that physical love is a sublime form of contact and touch. In inferior animal forms, as well as in human natures of a low and bestial type, love is nothing but touch and contact; but ascending to the high spheres of the animal world and of the human microcosm, the other senses also add their flowers to the garland of love, with the exception of taste, which takes no part in the pleasures of love, except in peculiar cases, which can, without any scruple, be entrusted to the clinic of pathological psychology. Of the other four senses, touch has the greatest part in love, hearing the smallest; sight and smell range between the two former in very different degrees.

The senses, however, differ more in the nature of the joys and sorrows with which they take part in the greatest of human passions than in the various quantities of elements which they yield to love. Touch conquers, and twinges with delight; sight reveals and charms; hearing impassions and conquers; smell cherishes and inebriates. We can easily have a comparative idea of the various parts which the four senses take in love by comparing these four moments: To see the beloved woman and gaze at her for a long time; to embrace her passionately; to hear her voice without seeing her; to inhale voluptuously the aroma with which she is wont to scent her robe.

A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million notes would be insufficient to express all the harmonies and melodies of amorous contact; and as the most voluminous dictionary in the world would decline to enter upon such an undertaking, the pen of the writer would slip into the field where science becomes lasciviousness. I regret at times that one of the greatest poets did not sing the sublime voluptuousness of love with such loftiness of style as to leave his pen uncontaminated. Perhaps man would like to know also the limits of the genius of lust, to mark the confines, too, of this human possibility; but I find some consolation for this sublime ignorance of ours, for this glorious lacuna left by modesty in the field of human knowledge, in thinking that where poetry kept silent and science inactive, where an intimate contact of two kisses creates a new existence, an unknown current transmits to the new man, together with the sparks of life, all the treasures of past voluptuousness; and the son of Adam, with a second kiss, will transmit the innate science of love, pour all the nectar of the chalice of voluptuousness into the lips of the daughter of Eve. Sublime science, which was never written on papyrus nor sculptured in marble or bronze, but is transmitted in the flash of a kiss through thousands of generations that loved, love, and will love!

From the purest caress on a mass of hair to the greatest hurricane of voluptuousness, touch always keeps the character moulded for it by its anatomy. Touch, in love, is always made oversensitive by voluptuousness, always deeply sensual, is always a positive, definite, uncontrasted and uncontrastable possession. Woman may delude herself into believing that she is unblemished by man's contact when his hand has but touched the hem of her garments or the leather of her shoes; but when skin has touched skin, when a finger has touched a finger, something is already lost of that waxy varnish which nature spreads upon the virginal fruit still preserving the perfume of the tree that nourished it. A hand that clasps a hand means, in love, two fires that blend in one; a mass of hair that touches a mass of hair means two streams of voluptuousness rushing into the bed of one river; two feet that come in contact are always two sparks that fly. A molecule of a man who loves can never touch impunely a molecule of the woman who returns his love; and although the contact may be more rapid than lightning, every molecule that returns to the spheres of its own individuality carries away something that does not belong to it, and leaves with the other something of itself. Touch soft iron with the loadstone and you will see it magnetized; touch a molecule of a man with that of a woman and the two molecules will not be what they were before. Touch is always the act of possession, and the thousand contacts can, gradually, steal so much, that we may find ourselves carried into the sphere of the woman we love, while she has entirely passed into our sphere. Not in vain the modest woman trembles and rebels at every innocent contact. Every sensation of touch, in love, means a boundary that is eliminated between two properties; it means the loss of a property.

It is not hypocrisy alone that makes modesty more exacting in higher races; in exquisitely elevated natures a contact is more dangerous because it radiates rapidly into the field of voluptuousness, into that of the other senses and that of sentiment. Vulgar natures begin where refined natures end; and while too elevated natures live long together, held back by the barrier of a handshake, the bold and uncouth rustic throws a kiss to the girl and embraces her at the first declaration of love. It is typical of this most powerful passion to perform a hundred miracles a day and thus arrest voluptuousness at the last boundary of kissing; but adroitness and fortune are necessary to make it possible to stop there for a long time. From handclasping to the kiss the path may be very long and even endless; but beyond a kiss given and returned, every definite boundary has vanished and everything is possible. Even in touch love has but two principal stations before the goal is reached; handclasping and kiss. Whoever believes she has remained a virgin after a kiss given and returned is a hypocrite, like him who believes that the studied reticence of lust may still leave something to conquer. O women who have the dangerous fortune to be beautiful and to be desired, do not let your adorers go beyond handclasping; you may in rare cases arrive at the kiss that you may receive; but remember that a kiss returned is a tremendous bond, which you should never sign,—never, of course, unless you intend to change your name.

Sight is the first messenger of love, and in elect natures it is so prodigal of joy to lovers as to excel, in extensity if not in intensity, even the insuperable heights of voluptuousness. Sight possesses everything save the delirium of possession, and rapid and penetrating as it is, it sounds at a stroke the abysses of infinite beauty, over which is suspended, as in a halo, the object of our love. What one contemplates with the eyes of love from head to foot always ends in two infinities into which desire hurls itself with frenzied audacity and insatiable curiosity. Sight is made to accompany us in that delicious excursion; and as it can tarry long and suavely at a dimple of the cheek, at the little vortex of a curl or at the opalescence of a nail, it can also compel us to pass and repass with vertiginous speed, a thousand times in a minute, through the divine lines that enclose our treasure.