euil and Phmeja are still rarer than
is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments proceed from
an unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to consider love as
a passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all and the most
contemptible. It promises everything, and fulfils nothing. It comes,
like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the first. Ah, talk to
me of revenge, hatred, avarice, of gaming, of ambition, of fanaticism.
These passions have something virile in them; these sentiments are
imperishable; they make sacrifices every day, such as love only makes
by fits and starts. But," he went on, "suppose you abjure love. At first
there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties, no worry, none of those
little vexations that waste human life. A man lives happy and tranquil;
in his social relations he becomes infinitely more powerful and
influential. This divorce from the thing called love is the primary
secret of power in all men who control large bodies of men; but this
is a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew with what magic influence a man is
endowed, what wealth of intellectual force, what longevity in physical
strength he enjoys, when detaching himself from every species of human
passion he spends all his energy to the profit of his soul! If you could
enjoy for two minutes the riches which God dispenses to the enlightened
men who consider love as merely a passing need which it is sufficient to
satisfy for six months in their twentieth year; to the men who, scorning
the luxurious and surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy, feed on the roots
which God has given in abundance, and take their repose on a bed of
withered leaves, like the recluses of the Thebaid!--ah! you would not
keep on three seconds the wool of fifteen merinos which covers you; you
would fling away your childish switch, and go to live in the heaven of
heavens! There you would find the love you sought in vain amid the swine
of earth; there you would hear a concert of somewhat different melody
from that of M. Rossini, voices more faultless than that of Malibran.
But I am speaking as a blind man might, and repeating hearsays. If I had
not visited Germany about the year 1791, I should know nothing of all
this. Yes!--man has a vocation for the infinite. There dwells within
him an instinct that calls him to God. God is all, gives all, brings
oblivion on all, and thought is the thread which he has given us as a
clue to communication with himself!"

He sudden