There would be a good deal to say on all that, my comrade.  My Cascaret, that is to say, the fiance in question, keeps himself for his fiancee.  She said to him, “Let us wait till you have accomplished certain definite work,” and he works.  She said to him, “Let us keep ourselves pure for each other,” and he keeps himself pure.  It is not that he is choked by Catholic spiritualism; but he has a high ideal of love, and why counsel him to go and lose it when his conscience and his honor depend on keeping it?

There is an equilibrium which Nature, our ruler, herself puts in our instincts, and she sets the limit to our appetites.  Great natures are not the most robust.  We are not developed in all our senses by a very logical education.  We are compressed in every way, and we thrust out our roots and branches when and how we can.  Great artists are often weak also, and many are impotent.  Some too strong in desire are quickly exhausted.  In general I think that we have too intense joys and sorrows, we who work with our brains.  The laborer who works his land and his wife hard by day and night is not a forceful nature.  His brain is very feeble.  You say to develop one’s self in every direction?  Come, not all at the same time, not without rest.

Those who brag of that, are bluffing a bit, or if they do everything, do everything ill.  If love for them is a little bread-and-butter and art a little pot-boiler, all right; but if their pleasure is great, verging on the infinite, and their work eager, verging on enthusiasm, they do not alternate these as in sleeping and waking.

As for me, I don’t believe in these Don Juans who are Byrons at the same time.  Don Juan did not make poems and Byron made, so they say, very poor love.  He must have had sometimes—­one can count such emotions in one’s life—­a complete ecstasy of heart, mind and senses.  He knew enough about them to be one of the poets of love.  Nothing else is necessary for the instrument of our vibration.  The continual wind of little appetites breaks them.

Try some day to write a novel in which the artist (the real artist) is the hero, you will see what great, but delicate and restrained, vigor is in it, how he will see everything with an attentive eye, curious and tranquil, and how his infatuations with the things he examines and delves into, will be rare and serious.  You will see also how he fears himself, how he knows that he can not surrender himself without exhaustion, and how a profound modesty in regard to the treasures of his soul prevents him from scattering and wasting them.

The artist is such a fine type to do, that I have never dared really to do him.  I do not consider myself worthy to touch that beautiful and very complicated figure; that is aiming too high for a mere woman.  But if it could certainly tempt you some day, it would be worth while.