The Cure of St. Nicholas was a thousand times right!  Let the priest make use of woman, nothing is more proper, as an instrument, as a pastime, hygienic and aperient; but let him stop there.

At certain periods, when the brain is heavy, the digestion is inactive, and the bowels are confined, when dizziness occurs, when the blood becoming too plentiful, grows thick and congested in the veins and rises to the head, then it is that nature needs to accomplish her work.  Then one seeks for a woman, one throws oneself on her who happens to be there, and is willing to lend herself to this hygienic and benevolent part.  Servant or mistress, girl or wife, lady or work-girl, young or old, courtesan from a drawing-room or the pavement, one takes her, has one’s pleasure of her, and goes away.

But to love long, to make of the woman the aim of our life, the spring of our actions, the ideal of our existence; to believe in happiness together, to put faith in these fragile, vain and ignorant dolls!...  What trickery!

To believe in happiness through love!  Dream of the school-boy!  It is permissible to the neophyte who puts on for the first time the white surplice and the golden chasuble with so much joy and pride.  The sweet young girls, the youthful wives, the grave matrons regard you with softened eyes.  Then you have faith, you have confidence, you see the future illumined by angels with virgin bodies who murmur mysterious words in your ear, which melt your heart.  You dare hardly lift your eyes, and you say to yourself:  “Which one shall I love in this legion of seraphims?  Oh, I will love them all, all!” Presumptuous youth which doubts of nothing!

But when you have loved one, two, three of them ... afterwards, afterwards?

After having experienced the nothingness of all these trifles, of all these follies of the heart, of all these caprices of the imagination, of all these abortions of the thought, of all these voids of the soul, of all these impurities of the body, of all the uncleanness of the woman with whom you are satiated, and whose couch you are leaving, then go and speak of eternal love.

Oh, how right Diogenes was to call love a short epilepsy.

How right that Imperial sophist of the Decline to call it a convulsion! and the first Bonaparte, an affair of the sopha.

Thus Marcel moralized, like an old prelate, coming out from a closed room when some filthy scene has been enacted.

The fact is, that for some time he had been the hero of a comedy and of a drama; the grotesque comedy which he had unrolled with his servant, the terrible drama in which he saw himself involved with Suzanne Durand.  And he was wearied and satiated.  The satisfaction of his senses left him by way of retaliation, shame, trouble and fear.

Daniel Defoe has written in his admirable book: 

“From how many mysterious sources, opposed one to the other, do not different circumstances cause our passions to proceed?  We hate in the evening what we cherished in the morning; we avoid to-day what we sought for yesterday; we desire an object passionately, and a few moments after, we shall not know how to endure the idea of it.”