nging of
birds. Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love,
more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which
real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature
all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the
ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus
and Thisbe.

"To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute,
is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect
nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.

"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