I have no more but a vain image remaining in my memory; only enough
to make me torment myself in their quest to no purpose.

Well, then, laying books aside, and more simply and materially speaking,
I find, after all, that Love is nothing else but the thirst of enjoying
the object desired, or Venus any other thing than the pleasure of
discharging one's vessels, just as the pleasure nature gives in
discharging other parts, that either by immoderation or indiscretion
become vicious. According to Socrates, love is the appetite of
generation by the mediation of beauty. And when I consider the
ridiculous titillation of this pleasure, the absurd, crack-brained, wild
motions with which it inspires Zeno and Cratippus, the indiscreet rage,
the countenance inflamed with fury and cruelty in the sweetest effects of
love, and then that austere air, so grave, severe, ecstatic, in so wanton
an action; that our delights and our excrements are promiscuously
shuffled together; and that the supreme pleasure brings along with it, as
in pain, fainting and complaining; I believe it to be true, as Plato
says, that the gods made man for their sport:

"Quaenam ista jocandi
Saevitia!"

["With a sportive cruelty" (Or:) "What an unkindness there is in
jesting!"--Claudian in Eutrop. i. 24.]

and that it was in mockery that nature has ordered the most agitative of
actions and the most common, to make us equal, and to put fools and wise
men, beasts and us, on a level. Even the most contemplative and prudent
man, when I imagine him in this posture, I hold him an impudent fellow to
pretend to be prudent and contemplative; they are the peacocks' feet that
abate his pride:

"Ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat?"

["What prevents us from speaking truth with a smile?"
--Horace, Sat., i. I, 24.]

They who banish serious imaginations from their sports, do, says one,
like him who dares not adore the statue of a saint, if not covered with a
veil. We eat and drink, indeed, as beasts do; but these are not actions
that obstruct the functions of the soul, in these we maintain our
advantage over them; this other action subjects all other thought,
and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato's divinity and
philosophy; and yet there is no complaint of it. In everything else a
man may keep some decorum, all other operati