ty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical
instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a
long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing 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