ll require to enable you to come and sup with
me."

"Alone?"

"Of course."

"May I venture to ask you for a pledge? The happiness which you promise
me is so immense!"

"What pledge do you want?"

"To see you standing before that small window in the grating with
permission for me to occupy the same place as Madame de S----."

She rose at once, and, with the most gracious smile, touched the spring;
after a most expressive kiss, I took leave of her. She followed me with
her eyes as far as the door, and her loving gaze would have rooted me to
the spot if she had not left the room.

I spent the two days of expectation in a whirl of impatient joy, which
prevented me from eating and sleeping; for it seemed to me that no other
love had ever given me such happiness, or rather that I was going to be
happy for the first time.

Irrespective of birth, beauty, and wit, which was the principal merit of
my new conquest, prejudice was there to enhance a hundredfold my
felicity, for she was a vestal: it was forbidden fruit, and who does not
know that, from Eve down to our days, it was that fruit which has always
appeared the most delicious! I was on the point of encroaching upon the
rights of an all-powerful husband; in my eyes M---- M---- was above all the
queens of the earth.

If my reason had not been the slave of passion, I should have known that
my nun could not be a different creature from all the pretty women whom I
had loved for the thirteen years that I had been labouring in the fields
of love. But where is the man in love who can harbour such a thought? If
it presents itself too often to his mind, he expels it disdainfully!
M---- M---- could not by any means be otherwise than superior to all other
women in the wide world.

Animal nature, which chemists call the animal kingdom, obtains through
instinct the three various means necessary for the perpetuation of its
species.

There are three real wants which nature has implanted in all human
creatures. They must feed themselves, and to prevent that task from being
insipid and tedious they have the agreeable sensation of appetite, which
they feel pleasure in satisfying. They must propagate their respective
species; an absolute necessity which proves the wisdom of the Creator,
since without reproduction all would, be annihilated--by the constant law
of degradation, decay and death. And, whatever St. Augustine may say,
human creatures would not perform the work of gener