she lavishes on our frail tabernacle of clay, she also exhibits in regard to the emotions of man, and to the double existence which is created by conjugal love.  She first sends us Confidence, which with extended hand and open heart says to us:  “Behold, I am thine forever!” Lukewarmness follows, walking with languid tread, turning aside her blonde face with a yawn, like a young widow obliged to listen to the minister of state who is ready to sign for her a pension warrant.  Then Indifference comes; she stretches herself on the divan, taking no care to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire but now lifted so chastely and so eagerly.  She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae with which her blase palate is bestrewn.  Finally the philosophical Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of life’s incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous combat.  She reckons up the arrearages, with farmers, and calculates the dowry of a child.  She materializes everything.  By a touch of her wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock.  Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, ’twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm.  What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs perform their functions.

“This is horrible!” I cried; “I am young and full of life!  Perish all the books in the world rather than my illusions should perish!”

I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris.  As I saw the fairest faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old.  The first young woman who appeared before me, lovely in face and form and dressed to perfection, with one glance of fire made all the sorcery whose spells I had voluntarily submitted to vanish into thin air.  Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book.  Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as I then saw before me.