If I were you, I would not investigate whether it be a good or a bad thing to fall in love.  I would prefer to have you ask whether it is good or bad to be thirsty; or, that it be forbidden to give one a drink because there are men who become intoxicated.  Inasmuch as you are not at liberty to divest yourself of an appetite belonging to the mechanical part of your nature, as could our ancient romancers, do not ruin yourself by speculating and meditating on the greater or less advantages in loving.  Take love as I have advised you to take it, only do not let it be to you a passion, only an amusement.

I understand what you are going to say:  you are going to overwhelm me again with your great principles, and tell me that a man has not sufficient control over his feelings to stop when he would.  Pooh!  I regard those who talk in that fashion in the same light as the man, who believes he is in honor bound to show great sorrow on the occasion of a loss or accident, which his friends consider great, but which is nothing to him.  Such a man feels less than any one the need of consolation, but he finds pleasure in showing his tears.  He rejoices to know that he possesses a heart capable of excessive emotion, and this softens it still more.  He feeds it with sorrow, he makes an idol of it, and offers it incense so often that he acquires the habit.  All such admirers of great and noble sentiments, spoiled by romances or by prudes, make it a point of honor to spiritualize their passion.  By force of delicate treatment, they become all the more infatuated with it, as they deem it to be their own work, and they fear nothing so much as the shame of returning to common sense and resuming their manhood.

Let us take good care, Marquis, not to make ourselves ridiculous in this way.  This fashion of straining our intelligence is nothing more, in the age in which we are living, than playing the part of fools.  In former times people took it into their heads that love should be something grave, they considered it a serious matter, and esteemed it only in proportion to its dignity.  Imagine exacting dignity from a child!  Away would go all its graces, and its youth would soon become converted into old age.  How I pity our good ancestors!  What with them was a mortal weariness, a melancholy frenzy, is with us a gay folly, a delicious delirium.  Fools that they were, they preferred the horrors of deserts and rocks, to the pleasures of a garden strewn with flowers.  What prejudices the habit of reflection has brought upon us!

The proof that great sentiments are nothing but chimeras of pride and prejudice, is, that in our day, we no longer witness that taste for ancient mystic gallantry, no more of those old fashioned gigantic passions.  Ridicule the most firmly established opinions, I will go further, deride the feelings that are believed to be the most natural and soon both will disappear, and men will stand amazed to see that ideas for which they possessed a sort of idolatry, are in reality nothing but trifles which pass away like the ever changing fashions.