hat human reason is the most beautiful of
faculties, that there is nothing real here below but quotations on the
Bourse, gambling in the salon, wine on the table, the glow of health,
indifference toward others, and the pleasures of the night.

For some day, across your stagnant life, a gust of wind will blow. Those
beautiful trees, that you water with the stream of oblivion, Providence
will destroy; despair will overtake you, heedless ones, and tears will
dim your eyes. I will not say that your mistresses will deceive you--that
would not grieve you so much as the loss of a horse--but you can lose on
the Bourse. For the first plunge is not the last, and even if you do not
gamble, bethink you that your moneyed tranquillity, your golden
happiness, are in the care of a banker who may fail. In short, I tell
you, frozen as you are, you are capable of loving something; some fibre
of your being can be torn and you can give vent to cries that will
resemble a moan of pain. Some day, wandering about the muddy streets,
when daily material joys shall have failed, you will find yourself seated
disconsolately on a deserted bench at midnight.

O men of marble! sublime egoists, inimitable reasoners, who have never
given way to despair or made a mistake in arithmetic, if this ever
happens to you, at the hour of your ruin you will remember Abelard when
he lost Heloise. For he loved her more than you love your horses, your
money, or your mistresses; and in losing her he lost more than your
monarch Satan would lose in falling again from the battlements of Heaven.
He loved her with a love of which the gazettes do not speak, the shadow
of which your wives and your daughters do not perceive in our theatres
and in our books. He passed half of his life kissing her white forehead,
teaching her to sing the psalms of David and the canticles of Saul; he
had but her on earth alone; and God consoled him.

Believe me, when in your distress you think of Abelard you will not look
with the same eye upon the rich blasphemy of Voltaire and the badinage of
Courier; you will feel that human reason can cure illusions but can not
heal sorrows; that God has use for Reason but that He has not made her a
sister of Charity. You will find that when the heart of man said: "I
believe in nothing, for I see nothing," it did not speak the last word on
the subject. You will look about you for something like hope, you will
shake the doors of churches to see if they still