“Perfection does not exist; to comprehend it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies.  Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite?  You try to form some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and who will die to-morrow!  This spectacle of immensity in every country in the world produces the wildest illusions.  Religions are born of it; it was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the people of the earth have stretched out their hands to that immensity and have longed to plunge into it.  The fool wishes to possess heaven; the sage admires it, kneels before it, but does not desire it.

“Perfection, my friend, is no more made for us than immensity.  We must seek for nothing in it, demand nothing of it, neither love nor beauty, happiness nor virtue; but we must love it if we would be virtuous, if we would attain the greatest happiness of which man is capable.

“Let us suppose you have in your study a picture by Raphael that you consider perfect.  Let us say that upon a close examination you discover in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb distorted, or a muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered, they say, in one of the arms of an antique gladiator.  You would experience a feeling of displeasure, but you would not throw that picture in the fire; you would merely say that it is not perfect, but that it has qualities that are worthy of admiration.

“There are women whose natural singleness of heart and sincerity are such that they could not have two lovers at the same time.  You believed your mistress such an one; that is best, I admit.  You have discovered that she has deceived you; does that oblige you to depose and to abuse her, to believe her deserving of your hatred?

“Even if your mistress had never deceived you, even if at this moment she loved none other than you, think, Octave, how far her love would still be from perfection, how human it would be, how small, how restrained by the hypocrisies and conventions of the world; remember that another man possessed her before you, that many others will possess her after you.

“Reflect:  what drives you at this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered.  But when you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the rotten ladder of human imperfection.