THEOREM.

Man goes from aversion to love; but if he has begun by loving, and
afterwards comes to feel aversion, he never returns to love.

In certain human organisms the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought
may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have
the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between
different things without formal deduction; and as they have the
faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining
them, or without the power of insight, comparison and expression; so
in the same way, different souls may have more or less imperfect ideas
of the various sentiments. Talent in love, as in every other art,
consists in the power of forming a conception combined with the power
of carrying it out. The world is full of people who sing airs, but who
omit the _ritornello_, who have quarters of an idea, as they have
quarters of sentiment, but who can no more co-ordinate the movements
of their affections than of their thoughts. In a word, they are
incomplete. Unite a fine intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and
you precipitate a disaster; for it is necessary that equilibrium be
preserved in everything.

We leave to the philosophers of the boudoir or to the sages of the
back parlor to investigate the thousand ways in which men of different
temperaments, intellects, social positions and fortunes disturb this
equilibrium. Meanwhile we will proceed to examine the last cause for
the setting of the honeymoon and the rising of the Red-moon.

There is in life one principle more potent than life itself. It is a
movement whose celerity springs from an unknown motive power. Man is
no more acquainted with the secret of this revolution than the earth
is aware of that which causes her rotation. A certain something, which
I gladly call the current of life, bears along our choicest thoughts,
makes use of most people's will and carries us on in spite of
ourselves. Thus, a man of common-sense, who never fails to pay his
bills, if he is a merchant, a man who has been able to escape death,
or what perhaps is more trying, sickness, by the observation of a
certain easy but daily regimen, is completely and duly nailed up
between the four planks of his coffin, after having said every
evening: "Dear me! to-morrow I will not forget my pills!" How are we
to explain this magic spell which rules all the affairs of life? Do
men submit to it from