re reminds us
every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses absolutely
to grant the excess which our imagination sometimes craves in love.
It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only one which may be
forgotten without causing any disturbance in the economy of the body.
Love is a social luxury like lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it as
a sentiment, we find two distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure
and passion. Now analyze pleasure. Human affections rest upon two
foundations, attraction and repulsion. Attraction is a universal feeling
for those things which flatter our instinct of self-preservation;
repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when it tells us that
something is near which threatens it with injury. Everything which
profoundly moves our organization gives us a deeper sense of our
existence; such a thing is pleasure. It is contracted of desire, of
effort, and the joy of possessing something or other. Pleasure is a
unique element in life, and our passions are nothing but modifications,
more or less keen, of pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure
almost always precludes the enjoyment of all others. Now, love is the
least keen and the least durable of our pleasures. In what would you say
the pleasure of love consists? Does it lie in the beauty of the beloved?
In one evening you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques; but
at the end of a month you will in this way have burnt out all your
sentiment for all time. Would you love a women because she is well
dressed, elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit? Do
not call this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism. Do you love her
because she is intellectual? You are in that case merely obeying the
dictates of literary sentiment."

"But," I said, "love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in
one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their
lives--"

"Oh dear, dear!" cried the old man, in a jeering tone. "Can you show me
five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I do
not say their life, for that is a slight thing,--the price of a human
life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs; and
there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave men who
would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven men have
sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have slept in
solitude for a whole night. Dubr