PREFACE[1]

[1][To the first edition, 1822.—Tr.][2]Extract from the Preface to M. Simond'sVoyage en Suisse, pp. 7, 8.

[1][To the first edition, 1822.—Tr.]

[2]Extract from the Preface to M. Simond'sVoyage en Suisse, pp. 7, 8.

ThiS work has had no success: it has been found unintelligible—not without reason. Therefore in this new edition the author's primary intention has been to render his ideas with clearness. He has related how they came to him, and he has made a preface and an introduction—all in order to be clear. Yet, in spite of so much care, out of a hundred who have readCorinne, there are not four readers who will understand this volume.

Although it deals with Love, this little book is no novel, and still less is it diverting like a novel. 'Tis simply and solely an exact scientific description of a kind of madness which is very rarely to be found in France. The Empire of propriety, growing day by day wider, under the influence of our fear of ridicule much more than through the purity of our morals, has made of the word, which serves as title to this work, an expression, of which outspoken mention is avoided and which at times seems even to give offence. I have been forced to make use of it, but the scientific austerity of the language shelters me, I think, in this respect, from all reproach.

I know one or two Secretaries of Legation who will, at their return, be able to tender me their services. Till then what can I say to the people who deny the facts of my narration? Beg them not to listen to it.

The form I have adopted may be reproached with egoism. A traveller is allowed to say: "Iwas at New York, thenceIembarked for South America,Imade my way back as far as Santa-Fé-de-Bogota. The gnats and mosquitoes mademylife a misery during the journey, and for three daysIcouldn't usemyright eye."

The traveller is not accused of loving to talk of himself: all hisme'sandmy'sare forgiven; for that is the clearest and most interesting manner of telling what he has seen.

It is in order, if possible, to be clear and picturesque, that the author of the present voyage into the little-known regions of the human heart says: "I went with Mme. Gherardi to the salt mines of Hallein.... Princess Crescenzi said to me at Rome.... One day at Berlin I saw handsome Capt. L...." All these little things really happened to the author, who passed fifteen years in Germany and Italy. But more observant than sensitive, he never encountered the least adventure himself, never experienced a single personal sentiment worthy of narration. Even supposing that he had the pride to believe the contrary, a still greater pride would have prevented him from publishing his heart and selling it on the market for six francs, like those people who in their lifetime publish their memoirs.

Correcting in 1822 the proofs of this kind of moral voyage in Italy and Germany, the author, who had described the objects the day that he had seen them, treated the manuscript, containing the detailed description of all the phases of this malady of the soul called Love, with that blind respect, shown by a scholar of the fourteenth century for a newly unearthed manuscript of Lactantius or Quintius Curtius. When the author met some obscure passage (and often, to say the truth, that happened), he always believed that the fault lay with the self who was reading, not with the self who had written. He confesses that his respect for theearly manuscript carried him so far as to print several passages, which he did not understand himself. Nothing more foolish for anyone who had thought of the good graces of the public; but the author, seeing Paris again after long travels, came to the conclusion that without grovelling before the Press a success was not to be had. Well, let him who brings himself to grovel keep that for the minister in power! A so-called success being out of the question, the author was pleased to publish his thoughts exactly as they had come to him. This was once upon a time the procedure of those philosophers of Greece, whose practical wisdom filled him with rapturous admiration.

It requires years to gain admittance to the inner circle of Italian society. Perhaps I shall have been the last traveller in that country. For since theCarbonariand the Austrian invasion, no foreigner will ever be received as a friend in thesalons, where such reckless gaiety reigned. The traveller will see the monuments, streets and public places of a city, never the society—he will always be held in fear: the inhabitants will suspect that he is a spy, or fear that he is laughing at the battle of Antrodoco and at the degradations, which, in that land, are the one and only safeguard against the persecution of the eight or ten ministers or favourites who surround the Prince. Personally, I really loved the inhabitants and could see the truth. Sometimes for ten months together I never spoke a word of French, and but for political troubles and theCarbonariI would never have returned to France. Good-nature is what I prize above all things.

In spite of great care to be clear and lucid, I cannot perform miracles: I cannot give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. So the people of great fortunes and gross pleasures, who have made a hundred thousand francs in the year preceding the moment they open this book, had better quickly shut it, especially if they arebankers, manufacturers, respectable industrial folk—that's to say, people with eminently positive ideas. This book would be less unintelligible to anyone who had made a large sum of money on the Stock Exchange or in a lottery. Such winnings may be found side by side with the habit of passing hours together in day-dreams, in the enjoyment of the emotion evoked by a picture of Prud'hon, a phrase of Mozart, still more, a certain peculiar look of a woman who is often in your thoughts. 'Tis not in this way that these people "waste their time," who pay ten thousand workmen at the end of each week: their minds work always towards the useful and the positive. The dreamer, of whom I speak, is the man they would hate, if they had time; 'tis him they like to make the butt of their harmless jokes. The industrial millionaire feels confusedly that such a man has moreestimefor a thought than for a bag of money.

I invite the studious young man to withdraw, if in the same year as the industrial gained a hundred thousand francs, he has acquired the knowledge of modern Greek, and is so proud of it that already he aspires to Arabic. I beg not to open this book every man, who has not been unhappy for imaginary reasons, reasons to which vanity is stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in thesalons.

I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of these verysalonsby an affectation that never lapses for an instant. Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of real feelings? In fact this work has been theirbête noire: they say that the author must be a wretch.

To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibilityand to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of thesalon, but in the eyes of a certain person in thesalon; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)—or even to enter thesalonwhere the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself—these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change in the tariff of Columbia.[2]

The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak, the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called the Passion of Love.

Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical figure, but on one condition—that it exists already on the blackboard, for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling, something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can a passion be seen?

This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.

Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula. Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as theNouvelle Héloïse, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse andManon Lescaut, have been written in France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches its full height scarcely ever.

What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it described—without ever feeling it—in hundreds of celebrated volumes, what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness? I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness."

Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase behind the other books—I should even leave a few pages uncut.

'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily,those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet to possess enough penetration to judgea prioriof the degree of exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered description of these weaknesses.

The grave persons, who enjoy in society their reputation as safe men with no romantic nonsense, are far nearer to the understanding of a novel, however impassioned, than of a book of philosophy, wherein the author describes coldly the various stages of the malady of the soul called Love. The novel moves them a little; but before the philosophic treatise these sensible people are like blind men, who getting a description of the pictures in a museum read out to them, would say to the author: "You must agree, sir, that your work is horribly obscure." What is to happen if these blind men chance to be wits, established long since in possession of that title and with sovereign claims to clairvoyance? The poor author will be treated prettily. In fact, it is what happened to him at the time of the first edition. Several copies were actually burnt through the raging vanity of very clever people. I do not speak of insults all the more flattering for their fury: the author was proclaimed to be coarse, immoral, a writer for the people, a suspicious character, etc. In countries outworn by monarchy, these titles are the surest reward for whoever thinks good to write on morals and does not dedicate his book to the Mme. Dubarry of the day. Blessed literature, if it were not in fashion, and interested those alone for whom it was written!

In the time of theCid, Corneille was nothing for M. le Marquis de Danjeau[3]but "a good fellow." Today the whole world thinks itself made to read M. de Lamartine: so much the better for his publisher, but so much the worse, and a hundred times the worse, forthat great poet. In our days genius offers accommodation to people to whom, under penalty of losing caste, it should never so much as give a thought.

The laborious and active, very estimable and very positive life of a counsellor of State, of a manufacturer of cotton goods or of a banker with a keen eye for loans finds its reward in millions, not in tender sensation. Little by little the heart of these gentlemen ossifies: the positive and the useful are for them everything, and their soul is closed to that feeling, which of all others has the greatest need of our leisure and makes us most unfit for any rational and steady occupation.

The only object of this preface is to proclaim that this book has the misfortune of being incomprehensible to all who have not found time to play the fool. Many people will feel offended and I trust they will go no further.

[1][May, 1826.—Tr.][2]"Cut this passage out," say my friends. "Nothing could be truer, but beware of the men of business: they'll cry out on the aristocrat." In 1812 I was not afraid of the Treasury: so why should I be afraid of the millionaire in 1820? The ships supplied to the Pasha of Egypt have opened my eyes in their direction, and I fear nothing but what I respect.[3]Videp. 120 ofMémoires de Danjeau(Édition Genlis).

[1][May, 1826.—Tr.]

[2]"Cut this passage out," say my friends. "Nothing could be truer, but beware of the men of business: they'll cry out on the aristocrat." In 1812 I was not afraid of the Treasury: so why should I be afraid of the millionaire in 1820? The ships supplied to the Pasha of Egypt have opened my eyes in their direction, and I fear nothing but what I respect.

[3]Videp. 120 ofMémoires de Danjeau(Édition Genlis).

I write for a hundred readers only and of these unhappy charming beings, without hypocrisy or moral cant, whom I would please, I know scarcely a couple. Of such as lie to gain consideration as writers, I take little heed. Certain fine ladies should keep to the accounts of their cook and the fashionable preacher of the day, be it Massillon or Mme. Necker, to be able to talk on these topics with the women of importance who mete out consideration. And to be sure, in France this noble distinction is always to be won by turning high priest of any fad.

To anyone who would read this book I would say: In all your life have you been unhappy six months for love?

Or, was your soul ever touched by sorrow not connected with the thought of a lawsuit, with failure at the last election, or with having cut a less brilliant figure than usual last season at Aix? I will continue my indiscretions and ask if in the year you have read any of those impudent works, which compel the reader to think? For example,Émileof J. J. Rousseau, or the six volumes of Montaigne? If, I should say, you have never suffered through this infirmity of noble minds, if you have not, in defiance of nature, the habit of thinking as you read, this book will give you a grudge against its author: for it will make you suspect that there exists a certain happiness, unknown to you and known to Mlle. de Lespinasse.

[1][May, 1834.—Tr.]

I come to beg indulgence of the reader for the peculiar form of this Physiology of Love. It is twenty-eight years (in 1842) since the turmoil, which followed the fall of Napoleon, deprived me of my position. Two years earlier chance threw me, immediately after the horrors of the retreat from Russia, into the midst of a charming town, where I had the enchanting prospect of passing the rest of my days. In happy Lombardy, at Milan, at Venice, the great, or rather only, business of life is pleasure. No attention, there, to the deeds and movements of your neighbour; hardly a troubled thought for what is to happen to you. If a man notice the existence of his neighbour, it does not enter his head to hate him. Take away from the occupations of a French provincial town jealousy—and what is left? The absence, the impossibility of that cruel jealousy forms the surest part of that happiness, which draws all the provincials to Paris.

Following the masked balls of Carnival, which in 1820 was more brilliant than usual, the noise of five or six completely reckless proceedings occupied the society of Milan an entire month; although they are used over there to things which in France would pass for incredible. The fear of ridicule would in this country paralyse such fantastic actions: only to speak of them I need great courage.

One evening people were discussing profoundly theeffects and the causes of these extravagances, at the house of the charming Mme. Pietra Grua(6), who happened, extraordinarily enough, not to be mixed up with these escapades. The thought came to me that perhaps in less than a year I should have nothing left of all those strange facts, and of the causes alleged for them, but a recollection, on which I could not depend. I got hold of a concert programme, and wrote a few words on it in pencil. A game of faro was suggested: we were thirty seated round a card-table, but the conversation was so animated that people forgot to play. Towards the close of the evening came in Col. Scotti, one of the most charming men in the Italian army: he was asked for his quantum of circumstances relative to the curious facts with which we were busy, and, indeed, his story of certain things, which chance had confided to his knowledge, gave them an entirely new aspect. I took up my concert programme and added these new circumstances.

This collection of particulars on Love was continued in the same way, with pencil and odd scraps of paper, snatched up in thesalons, where I heard the anecdotes told. Soon I looked for a common rule by which to recognise different degrees in them. Two months later fear of being taken for aCarbonaromade me return to Paris—only for a few months I hoped, but never again have I seen Milan, where I had passed seven years.

Pining with boredom at Paris, I conceived the idea of occupying myself again with the charming country from which fear had driven me. I strung together my scraps of paper and presented the book to a publisher. But soon a difficulty was raised: the printer declared that it was impossible to work from notes written in pencil and I could see that he found such copy beneath his dignity. The printer's young apprentice, who brought me back my notes, seemed quite ashamed of the more than doubtful compliment, which had been put intohis mouth: he knew how to write and I dictated to him my pencil notes.

I understood, too, that discretion required me to change the proper names, and, above all, abridge the anecdotes. Although no one reads in Milan, the book, if ever it reached there, might have seemed a piece of wicked mischief.

So I brought out an ill-fated volume. I have the courage to own that I despised at that period elegance in style. I saw the young apprentice wholly taken up with avoiding sentence-endings that were unmusical and odd sounds in the arrangement of words. In return, he made throughout no scruple of changing details of fact, difficult to express: Voltaire himself is afraid of things which are difficult to tell.

The Essay on Love had no claim to merit except the number of the fine shades of feeling, which I begged the reader to verify among his memories, if he were happy enough to have any. But in all this there was something much worse: I was then, as ever, very inexperienced in the department of literature and the publisher, to whom I had presented the MS., printed it on bad paper and in an absurdformat. In fact a month later, when I asked him for news of the book—"On peut dire qu'il est sacré,"[2]he said, "For no one comes near it."

It had never even crossed my mind to solicit articles in the papers: such a thing would have seemed to me an ignominy. And yet no work was in more pressing need of recommendation to the patience of the reader. Under the menace of becoming unintelligible at the very outset, it was necessary to bring the public to accept the new word "crystallisation," suggested as a lively expression for that collection of strange fancies, which we weave round our idea of the loved one, as true and even indubitable realities.

At that time wholly absorbed in my love for the least details, which I had lately observed in the Italy of my dreams, I avoided with care every concession, every amenity of style, which might have rendered the Essay on Love less peculiarly fantastic in the eyes of men of letters.

Further, I was not flattering to the public. Literature at that time, all defaced by our great and recent misfortunes, seemed to have no other interest than the consolation of our unhappy pride: it used to rhyme "gloire" with "victoire," "guerriers" with "lauriers,"[3]etc. The true circumstances of the situations, which it pretends to treat, seem never to have any attraction for the tedious literature of that period: it looks for nothing but an opportunity of complimenting that people, enslaved to fashion, whom a great man had called a great nation, forgetting that they were only great on condition that their leader was himself.

As the result of my ignorance of the exigencies of the humblest success, I found no more than seventeen readers between 1822 and 1833: it is doubtful whether the Essay on Love has been understood after twenty years of existence by a hundred connoisseurs. A few have had the patience to observe the various phases of this disease in the people infected with it in their circle; for we must speak of it as a disease, in order to understand that passion which in the last thirty years our fear of ridicule has taken so much trouble to hide—it is this way which sometimes leads to its cure.

Now and now only, after half a century of revolutions, engrossing one after another our whole attention, now and now only after five complete changes in the form and the tendencies of our government, does the revolution just begin to show itself in our way of living. Love, or that which commonly appropriates Love's name and fills its place, was all-powerful in the France ofLewis XV. Colonels were created by the ladies of the court; and that court was nothing less than the fairest place in the kingdom. Fifty years after, the court is no more; and the gift of a licence to sell tobacco in the meanest provincial town is beyond the power of the most surely established ladies of the reigningbourgeoisieor of the pouting nobility.

It must be owned, women are out of fashion. In our brilliantsalonsthe young men of twenty affect not to address them; they much prefer to stand round the noisy talker dealing, in a provincial accent, with the question of the right to vote, and to try and slip in their own little word. The rich youths, who, to keep up a show of the good-fellowship of past times, take a pride in seeming frivolous, prefer to talk horses and play high in the circles where women are excluded. The deadly indifference which seems to preside over the relations of young men and the women of five-and-twenty, for whose presence society has to thank the boredom of marriage, will bring, perhaps, a few wise spirits to accept this scrupulously exact description of the successive phases of the malady called Love.

Seeing the terrible change which has plunged us into the stagnation of to-day, and makes unintelligible to us the society of 1778, such as we find it in the letters of Diderot to Mlle. Voland, his mistress, or in the Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, a man might ask the question, which of our successive governments has killed in us the faculty of enjoying ourselves, and drawn us nearer to the gloomiest people on the face of the earth? The only passable thing which that people have invented—parliament and the honesty of their parties—we are unable even to copy. In return, the stupidest of their gloomy conceptions, the spirit of dignity, has come among us to take the place of our French gaiety, which is to be found now only in the five hundred balls in the outskirts of Paris or in the south of France, beyond Bordeaux.

But which of our successive governments has cost us the fearful misfortune of anglicisation? Must we accuse that energetic government of 1793, which prevented the foreigners from coming to pitch their camp in Montmartre—that government which in a few years will seem heroic in our eyes and forms a worthy prelude to that, which under Napoleon, went forth to carry our name into all the capitals of Europe?

We shall pass over the well-meaning stupidity of theDirectoire, illustrated by the talents of Carnot and the immortal campaign of 1796–1797 in Italy.

The corruption of the court of Barras still recalled something of the gaiety of the old order; the graces of Madame Bonaparte proved that we had no aptitude at that time for the churlishness and charnel-house of the English.

The profound respect, which despite the jealousy of the faubourg Saint-Germain, we could not but feel for the First Consul's method of government, and the men whose superior merit adorned the society of Paris—such as the Cretets and the Darus—relieves the Empire of the burden of responsibility for the remarkable change which has been effected, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the character of the French.

Unnecessary to carry my investigation further: the reader will reflect and be quite able to draw his own conclusions.

[1][1842. As Stendhal died early in that year, this probably is his last writing.—Tr.][2]["One might say it's taboo..." "Taboo" is a poor equivalent for "sacré," which means "cursed" as well as "blessed."—Tr.][3]["Glory with victory, warrior with laurel."—Tr.]

[1][1842. As Stendhal died early in that year, this probably is his last writing.—Tr.]

[2]["One might say it's taboo..." "Taboo" is a poor equivalent for "sacré," which means "cursed" as well as "blessed."—Tr.]

[3]["Glory with victory, warrior with laurel."—Tr.]

ON LOVE

My aim is to comprehend that passion, of which every sincere development has a character of beauty.

There are four kinds of love.

1. Passion-love—that of the Portuguese nun(1), of Héloïse for Abelard, of Captain de Vésel, of Sergeant de Cento.

2. Gallant love—that which ruled in Paris towards 1760, to be found in the memoirs and novels of the period, in Crébillon, Lauzun, Duclos, Marmontel, Chamfort, Mme. d'Épinay, etc. etc.

'Tis a picture in which everything, to the very shadows, should be rose-colour, in which may enter nothing disagreeable under any pretext whatsoever, at the cost of a lapse of etiquette, of good taste, of refinement, etc. A man of breeding foresees all the ways of acting, that he is likely to adopt or meet with in the different phases of this love. True love is often less refined; for that in which there is no passion and nothing unforeseen, has always a store of ready wit: the latter is a cold and pretty miniature, the former a picture by the Carracci. Passion-love carries us away in defiance of all our interests, gallant love manages always to respect them. True, if we take from this poor love its vanity, there is very little left: once stripped, it is like a tottering convalescent, scarcely able to drag himself along.

3. Physical love. Out hunting—a fresh, pretty countrygirl crosses your path and escapes into the wood. Everyone knows the love founded on this kind of pleasure: and all begin that way at sixteen, however parched and unhappy the character.

4. Vanity-love. The vast majority of men, especially in France, desire and have a fashionable woman, in the same way as a man gets a fine horse, as something which the luxury of a young man demands. Their vanity more or less flattered, more or less piqued, gives birth to transports of feelings. Sometimes there is also physical love, but by no means always: often there is not so much as physical pleasure. A duchess is never more than thirty for a bourgeois, said the Duchesse de Chaulnes, and those admitted to the Court of that just man, king Lewis of Holland, recall with amusement a pretty woman from the Hague, who could not help finding any man charming who was Duke or Prince. But true to the principle of monarchy, as soon as a Prince arrived at Court, the Duke was dismissed: she was, as it were, the decoration of the diplomatic body.

The happiest case of this uninspiring relationship is that in which to physical pleasure is added habit. In that case store of memories makes it resemble love a little; there is the pique of self-esteem and sadness on being left; then, romance forces upon us its ideas and we believe that we are in love and melancholy, for vanity aspires to credit itself with a great passion. This, at least, is certain that, whatever kind of love be the source of pleasure, as soon as the soul is stirred, the pleasure is keen and its memory alluring, and in this passion, contrary to most of the others, the memory of our losses seems always to exceed the bounds of what we can hope for in the future.

Sometimes, in vanity-love habit or despair of finding better produces a kind of friendship, of all kinds the least pleasant: it prides itself on its security, etc.[1]

Physical pleasure, being of our nature, is known to everybody, but it takes no more than a subordinate position in the eyes of tender and passionate souls. If they raise a laugh in the salons, if often they are made unhappy in the intrigues of society, in return the pleasure which they feel must remain always inaccessible to those hearts, whose beat only vanity and gold can quicken.

A few virtuous and sensitive women have scarcely a conception of physical pleasures: they have so rarely risked them, if one may use the expression, and even then the transports of passion-love caused bodily pleasure almost to be forgotten.

There are men victims and instruments of diabolical pride, of a pride in the style of Alfieri. Those people who, perhaps, are cruel because, like Nero, judging all men after the pattern of their own heart, they are always a-tremble—such people, I say, can attain physical pleasure only in so far as it is accompanied by the greatest possible exercise of pride, in so far, that is to say, as they practise cruelties on the companion of their pleasures. Hence the horrors ofJustine(2). At any rate such men have no sense of security.

To conclude, instead of distinguishing four different forms of love, we can easily admit eight or ten shades of difference. Perhaps mankind has as many ways of feeling as of seeing; but these differences of nomenclature alter in no degree the judgments which follow. Subject to the same laws, all forms of love, which can be seen here below, have their birth, life and death or ascend to immortality.[2]

[1]Well-known dialogue of Pont de Veyle with Madame du Deffant, at the fireside.[2]This book is a free translation of an Italian MS. of M. Lisio Visconti, a young man of the highest distinction, who died recently at Volterra, the place of his birth. The day of his sudden death he gave the translator permission to publish his Essay on Love, if means were found to shape it to a decorous form. Castel Fiorentino, June 10th, 1819.

[1]Well-known dialogue of Pont de Veyle with Madame du Deffant, at the fireside.

[2]This book is a free translation of an Italian MS. of M. Lisio Visconti, a young man of the highest distinction, who died recently at Volterra, the place of his birth. The day of his sudden death he gave the translator permission to publish his Essay on Love, if means were found to shape it to a decorous form. Castel Fiorentino, June 10th, 1819.

This is what takes place in the soul:—

1. Admiration.

2. A voice within says: "What pleasure to kiss, to be kissed."

3. Hope(3).

We study her perfections: this is the moment at which a woman should yield to realise the greatest possible physical pleasure. In the case even of the most reserved women, their eyes redden at the moment when hope is conceived: the passion is so strong, the pleasure so keen, that it betrays itself by striking signs.

4. Love is born.

To love—that is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, feeling, through all the senses and as near as possible, an object to be loved and that loves us.

5. The first crystallisation begins.

The lover delights in decking with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love he is sure: he dwells on all the details of his happiness with a satisfaction that is boundless. He is simply magnifying a superb bounty just fallen to him from heaven,—he has no knowledge of it but the assurance of its possession.

Leave the mind of a lover to its natural movements for twenty-four hours, and this is what you will find.

At the salt mines of Salzburg a branch stripped of its leaves by winter is thrown into the abandoned depths of the mine; taken out two or three months later it is covered with brilliant crystals; the smallest twigs, thoseno stouter than the leg of a sparrow, are arrayed with an infinity of sparkling, dazzling diamonds; it is impossible to recognise the original branch.

I call crystallisation the operation of the mind which, from everything which is presented to it, draws the conclusion that there are new perfections in the object of its love.

A traveller speaks of the freshness of the orange groves at Genoa, on the sea coast, during the scorching days of summer.—What pleasure to enjoy that freshness with her!

One of your friends breaks his arm in the hunting-field.—How sweet to be nursed by a woman you love! To be always with her, to see every moment her love for you, would make pain almost a blessing: and starting from the broken arm of your friend, you conclude with the absolute conviction of the angelic goodness of your mistress. In a word, it is enough to think of a perfection in order to see it in that which you love.

This phenomenon, which I venture to call crystallisation, is the product of human nature, which commands us to enjoy and sends warm blood rushing to our brain; it springs from the conviction that the pleasures of love increase with the perfections of its object, and from the idea: "She is mine." The savage has no time to go beyond the first step. He is delighted, but his mental activity is employed in following the flying deer in the forest, and with the flesh with which he must as soon as possible repair his forces, or fall beneath the axe of his enemy.

At the other pole of civilisation, I have no doubt that a sensitive woman may come to the point of feeling no physical pleasure but with the man she loves.[1]It is the opposite with the savage. But among civilised peoples, woman has leisure at her disposal, while the savage is so pressed with necessary occupations that he is forced totreat his female as a beast of burden. If the females of many animals are more fortunate, it is because the subsistence of the males is more assured.

But let us leave the backwoods again for Paris. A man of passion sees all perfections in that which he loves. And yet his attention may still be distracted; for the soul has its surfeit of all that is uniform, even of perfect bliss.[2]

This is what happens to distract his attention:—

6. Birth of Doubt.

After ten or twelve glances, or some other series of actions, which can last as well several days as one moment, hopes are first given and later confirmed. The lover, recovered from his first surprise and, accustomed to his happiness or guided by theory, which, always based on the most frequent cases, must only take light women into account—the lover, I say, demands more positive proofs and wishes to press his good fortune.

He is parried with indifference,[3]coldness, even anger, if he show too much assurance—in France a shade of irony, which seems to say: "You are not quite as far as you think."

A woman behaves in this way, either because she wakes up from a moment of intoxication, and obeys the word of modesty, which she trembles to have infringed, or simply through prudence or coquetry.

The lover comes to doubt of the happiness, to which he looked forward: he scans more narrowly the reasons that he fancied he had for hope.

He would like to fall back upon the other pleasures of life, and finds them annihilated. He is seized with the fear of a terrible disaster, and at the same time with a profound preoccupation.

7. Second crystallisation.

Here begins the second crystallisation, which forms diamonds out of the proofs of the idea—"She loves me."

The night which follows the birth of doubts, every quarter of an hour, after a moment of fearful unhappiness, the lover says to himself—"Yes, she loves me"—and crystallisation has its turn, discovering new charms. Then doubt with haggard eye grapples him and brings him to a standstill, blank. His heart forgets to beat—"But does she love me?" he says to himself. Between these alternatives, agonising and rapturous, the poor lover feels in his very soul: "She would give me pleasures, which she alone can give me and no one else."

It is the palpability of this truth, this path on the extreme edge of a terrible abyss and within touch, on the other hand, of perfect happiness, which gives so great a superiority to the second crystallisation over the first.

The lover wanders from moment to moment between these three ideas:—

The most agonising moment of love, still young, is when it sees the false reasoning it has made, and must destroy a whole span of crystallisation.

Doubt is the natural outcome of crystallisation.

[1]If this peculiarity is not observed in the case of man, the reason is that on his side there is no modesty to be for a moment sacrificed.[2]That is to say, that the same tone of existence can give but one instant of perfect happiness; but with a man of passion, his mood changes ten times a day.[3]Thecoup de foudre(thunderbolt from the blue), as it was called in the novels of the seventeenth century, which disposes of the fate of the hero and his mistress, is a movement of the soul, which for having been abused by a host of scribblers, is experienced none the less in real life. It comes from the impossibility of this defensive manoeuvre. The woman who loves finds too much happiness in the sentiment, which she feels, to carry through successful deception: tired of prudence, she neglects all precaution and yields blindly to the passion of loving. Diffidence makes thecoup de foudreimpossible.

[1]If this peculiarity is not observed in the case of man, the reason is that on his side there is no modesty to be for a moment sacrificed.

[2]That is to say, that the same tone of existence can give but one instant of perfect happiness; but with a man of passion, his mood changes ten times a day.

[3]Thecoup de foudre(thunderbolt from the blue), as it was called in the novels of the seventeenth century, which disposes of the fate of the hero and his mistress, is a movement of the soul, which for having been abused by a host of scribblers, is experienced none the less in real life. It comes from the impossibility of this defensive manoeuvre. The woman who loves finds too much happiness in the sentiment, which she feels, to carry through successful deception: tired of prudence, she neglects all precaution and yields blindly to the passion of loving. Diffidence makes thecoup de foudreimpossible.

A very small degree of hope is enough to cause the birth of love.

In the course of events hope may fail—love is none the less born. With a firm, daring and impetuous character, and in an imagination developed by the troubles of life, the degree of hope may be smaller: it can come sooner to an end, without killing love.

If a lover has had troubles, if he is of a tender, thoughtful character, if he despairs of other women, and if his admiration is intense for her whom he loves, no ordinary pleasure will succeed in distracting him from the second crystallisation. He will prefer to dream of the most doubtful chance of pleasing her one day, than to accept from an ordinary woman all she could lavish.

The woman whom he loves would have to kill his hope at that period, and (note carefully, not later) in some inhuman manner, and overwhelm him with those marks of patent contempt, which make it impossible to appear again in public.

Far longer delays between all these periods are compatible with the birth of love.

It demands much more hope and much more substantial hope, in the case of the cold, the phlegmatic and the prudent. The same is true of people no longer young.

It is the second crystallisation which ensures love's duration, for then every moment makes it clear that the question is—be loved or die. Long months of love haveturned into habit this conviction of our every moment—how find means to support the thought of loving no more? The stronger the character the less is it subject to inconstancy.

This second crystallisation is almost entirely absent from the passions inspired by women who yield too soon.

After the crystallisations have worked—especially the second, which is far the stronger—the branch is no longer to be recognised by indifferent eyes, for:—

(1) It is adorned with perfections which they do not see.

(2) It is adorned with perfections which for them are not perfections at all.

The perfection of certain charms, mentioned to him by an old friend of his love, and a certain hint of liveliness noticed in her eye, are a diamond in the crystallisation[1]of Del Rosso. These ideas, conceived during the evening, keep him dreaming all the night.

An unexpected answer, which makes me see more clearly a tender, generous, ardent, or, as it is popularly called, romantic[2]soul, preferring to the happiness of kings the simple pleasures of a walk with the loved one at midnight in a lonely wood, gives me food for dreams[3]for a whole night.

Let him call my mistress a prude: I shall call his a whore.

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