result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual
urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature
reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the
other hand, refuses absolutely to grant the excess
which our imagination sometimes craves in love.
It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only
one which may be forgotten without causing any disturbance
in the economy of the body. Love is a social luxury
like lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it
as a sentiment, we find two distinct elements in it;
namely, pleasure and passion. Now analyze pleasure.
Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction
and repulsion. Attraction is a universal feeling
for those things which flatter our instinct of self-preservation;
repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when
it tells us that something is near which threatens
it with injury. Everything which profoundly moves
our organization gives us a deeper sense of our existence;
such a thing is pleasure. It is contracted of
desire, of effort, and the joy of possessing something
or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
and our passions are nothing but modifications, more
or less keen, of pleasure; moreover, familiarity with
one pleasure almost always precludes the enjoyment
of all others. Now, love is the least keen and
the least durable of our pleasures. In what would
you say the pleasure of love consists? Does it
lie in the beauty of the beloved? In one evening
you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques;
but at the end of a month you will in this way have
burnt out all your sentiment for all time. Would
you love a women because she is well dressed, elegant,
rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit?
Do not call this love, for it is vanity, avarice,
egotism. Do you love her because she is intellectual?
You are in that case merely obeying the dictates of
literary sentiment.”
“But,” I said, “love only reveals
its pleasures to those who mingle in one their thoughts,
their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their
lives—”
“Oh dear, dear!” cried the old man, in
a jeering tone. “Can you show me five men
in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman?
I do not say their life, for that is a slight thing,—the
price of a human life under Napoleon was never more
than twenty thousand francs; and there are in France
to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave men who
would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while
seven men have sacrificed for a woman ten millions
on which they might have slept in solitude for a whole
night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are still rarer than
is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments
proceed from an unknown cause. But you have brought
me thus to consider love as a passion. Yes, indeed,
it is the last of them all and the most contemptible.
It promises everything, and fulfils nothing.
It comes, like love, as a need, the last, and dies
away the first. Ah, talk to me of revenge, hatred,