ou may taste of life without
fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or
respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest?

"If you are mediocre and ordinary, I advise you to consider your course
very carefully before deciding, but do not expect too much of your
mistress.

"If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to
be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil,
make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield
to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead
plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers. The sap of your life
will dissipate into the formation of useless bark; all your actions will
be as colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to
water you, but those from your own eyes; to nourish you, no heart but
your own.

"But if you are of an exalted nature, believing in dreams and wishing to
realize them, I say to you plainly: Love does not exist.

"For to love is to give body and soul, or better, it is to make a single
being of two; it is to walk in the sunlight, in the open air through
the boundless prairies with a body having four arms, two heads, and two
hearts. Love is faith, it is the religion of terrestrial happiness, it
is a luminous triangle suspended in the temple of the world. To love
is to walk freely through that temple, at your side a being capable of
understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and raise
your eyes to that celestial triangle. To exercise the noble faculties of
man is a great good--that is why genius is glorious; but to double those
faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a heart and an
intelligence--that is supreme happiness. God has nothing better for man;
that is why love is better than genius.

"But tell me, is that the love of our women? No, no, it must be
admitted. Love, for them, is another thing; it is to go out veiled, to
write in secret, to make trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs under
starched and unnatural robes, then to draw bolts and throw them aside,
to humiliate a rival, to deceive a husband, to render a lover desolate.
To love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play at hide
and seek, a hideous orgy of the heart, worse than the lubricity of the
Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; a bastard parody of vice itself,
as well as of virtue; a loathsome comedy where al