inciples, and tell me that a man has not
sufficient control over his feelings to stop when he would. Pooh! I
regard those who talk in that fashion in the same light as the man,
who believes he is in honor bound to show great sorrow on the occasion
of a loss or accident, which his friends consider great, but which is
nothing to him. Such a man feels less than any one the need of
consolation, but he finds pleasure in showing his tears. He rejoices
to know that he possesses a heart capable of excessive emotion, and
this softens it still more. He feeds it with sorrow, he makes an idol
of it, and offers it incense so often that he acquires the habit. All
such admirers of great and noble sentiments, spoiled by romances or by
prudes, make it a point of honor to spiritualize their passion. By
force of delicate treatment, they become all the more infatuated with
it, as they deem it to be their own work, and they fear nothing so
much as the shame of returning to common sense and resuming their
manhood.

Let us take good care, Marquis, not to make ourselves ridiculous in
this way. This fashion of straining our intelligence is nothing more,
in the age in which we are living, than playing the part of fools. In
former times people took it into their heads that love should be
something grave, they considered it a serious matter, and esteemed it
only in proportion to its dignity. Imagine exacting dignity from a
child! Away would go all its graces, and its youth would soon become
converted into old age. How I pity our good ancestors! What with them
was a mortal weariness, a melancholy frenzy, is with us a gay folly, a
delicious delirium. Fools that they were, they preferred the horrors
of deserts and rocks, to the pleasures of a garden strewn with
flowers. What prejudices the habit of reflection has brought upon us!

The proof that great sentiments are nothing but chimeras of pride and
prejudice, is, that in our day, we no longer witness that taste for
ancient mystic gallantry, no more of those old fashioned gigantic
passions. Ridicule the most firmly established opinions, I will go
further, deride the feelings that are believed to be the most natural
and soon both will disappear, and men will stand amazed to see that
ideas for which they possessed a sort of idolatry, are in reality
nothing but trifles which pass away like the ever changing fashions.

You will understand, then, Marquis, that it is not necessary to
acquire the habit o