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, avarice, of gaming, of
ambition, of fanaticism. These passions have something virile in them;
these sentiments are imperishable; they make sacrifices every day,
such as love only makes by fits and starts. But," he went on, "suppose
you abjure love. At first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties,
no worry, none of those little vexations that waste human life. A man
lives happy and tranquil; in his social relations he becomes
infinitely more powerful and influential. This divorce from the thing
called love is the primary secret of power in all men who control
large bodies of men; but this is a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew with
what magic influence a man is endowed, what wealth of intellectual
force, what longevity in physical strength he enjoys, when detaching
himself from every species of human passion he spends all his energy
to the profit of his soul! If you could enjoy for two minutes the
riches which God dispenses to the enlightened men who consider love as
merely a passing need which it is sufficient to satisfy for six months
in their twentieth year; to the men who, scorning the luxurious and
surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy, feed on the roots which God has
given in abundance, and take their repose on a bed of withered leaves,
like the recluses of the Thebaid!--ah! you would not keep on three
seconds the wool of fifteen merinos which covers you; you would fling
away your childish switch, and go to live in the heaven of heavens!
There you would find the love you sought in vain amid the swine of
earth; there you would hear a concert of somewhat different melody
from that of M. Rossini, voices more faultless than that of Malibran.
But I am speaking as a blind man might, and repeating hearsays. If I
had not visited Germany