ll in love are rare. A rich young girl he cannot obtain in a region
where all is calculation; a poor young girl he is prevented from loving;
it would be, as provincials say, marrying hunger and thirst. Such
monkish solitude is, however, dangerous to youth.

These reflections explain why provincial life is so firmly based on
marriage. Thus we find that ardent and vigorous genius, forced to rely
on the independence of its own poverty, quits these cold regions where
thought is persecuted by brutal indifference, where no woman is willing
to be a sister of charity to a man of talent, of art, of science.

Who will really understand Athanase Granson's love for Mademoiselle
Cormon? Certainly neither rich men--those sultans of society who fill
their harems--nor middle-class men, who follow the well-beaten high-road
of prejudices; nor women who, not choosing to understand the passions of
artists, impose the yoke of their virtues upon men of genius, imagining
that the two sexes are governed by the same laws.

Here, perhaps, we should appeal to those young men who suffer from the
repression of their first desires at the moment when all their forces
are developing; to artists sick of their own genius smothering under the
pressure of poverty; to men of talent, persecuted and without influence,
often without friends at the start, who have ended by triumphing over
that double anguish, equally agonizing, of soul and body. Such men
will well understand the lancinating pains of the cancer which was
now consuming Athanase; they have gone through those long and bitter
deliberations made in presence of some grandiose purpose they had not
the means to carry out; they have endured those secret miscarriages in
which the fructifying seed of genius falls on arid soil. Such men know
that the grandeur of desires is in proportion to the height and breadth
of the imagination. The higher they spring, the lower they fall; and how
can it be that ties and bonds should not be broken by such a fall?
Their piercing eye has seen--as did Athanase--the brilliant future which
awaited them, and from which they fancied that only a thin gauze parted
them; but that gauze through which their eyes could see is changed by
Society into a wall of iron. Impelled by a vocation, by a sentiment of
art, they endeavor again and again to live by sentiments which society
as incessantly materializes. Alas! the provinces calculate and arrange
marriage with the one view of materi