my nights
sleepless, while thinking of her. I have no experience of waking
thoughts bright with thought and memories of her. I have never known the
wild rapture of hope before her arrival, or the divine sadness of regret
when she went from me, leaving behind her a delicate odor of violet
powder.

I have never been in love.

I have also often asked myself why this is. And truly I can scarcely
tell. Nevertheless I have found some reasons for it; but they are of a
metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not be able to appreciate
them.

I suppose I am too critical of women to submit to their fascination. I
ask you to forgive me for this remark. I will explain what I mean. In
every creature there is a moral being and a physical being. In order to
love, it would be necessary for me to find a harmony between these two
beings which I have never found. One always predominates; sometimes the
moral, sometimes the physical.

The intellect which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to
love her, is not the same as the virile intellect. It is more, and it
is less. A woman must be frank, delicate, sensitive, refined,
impressionable. She has no need of either power or initiative in
thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry and
that faculty of assimilation which, in a little while, raises her to
an equality with him who shares her life. Her greatest quality must be
tact, that subtle sense which is to the mind what touch is to the body.
It reveals to her a thousand little things, contours, angles and forms
on the plane of the intellectual.

Very frequently pretty women have not intellect to correspond with their
personal charms. Now, the slightest lack of harmony strikes me and
pains me at the first glance. In friendship this is not of importance.
Friendship is a compact in which one fairly shares defects and merits.
We may judge of friends, whether man or woman, giving them credit for
what is good, and overlooking what is bad in them, appreciating them at
their just value, while giving ourselves up to an intimate, intense and
charming sympathy.

In order to love, one must be blind, surrender one's self absolutely,
see nothing, question nothing, understand nothing. One must adore the
weakness as well as the beauty of the beloved object, renounce all
judgment, all reflection, all perspicacity.

I am incapable of such blindness and rebel at unreasoning subjugation.
This is not all. I have