, on account of any of
you. I have not passed my nights thinking of one woman without closing
my eyes. I have no experience of waking up with the thought and the
memory of her shedding their illumination on me. I have never known
the wild desperation of hope when she was about to come, or the divine
sadness of regret when she parted with me, leaving behind her in the
room a delicate odor of violet powder and flesh.

I have never been in love.

I, too, have often asked myself why is this. And truly I can scarcely
tell. Nevertheless, I have found some reasons for it; but they are of
a metaphysical character, and perhaps you will not be able to
appreciate them.

I suppose I sit too much in judgment on women to submit much to their
fascination. I ask you to forgive me for this remark. I am going to
explain what I mean. In every creature there is a moral being and a
physical being. In order to love, it would be necessary for me to find
a harmony between these two beings which I have never found. One has
always too great a predominance over the other, sometimes the moral,
sometimes the physical.

The intellect which we have a right to require in a woman, in order to
love her, is not the same as virile intellect. It is more and it is
less. A woman must have a mind open, delicate, sensitive, refined,
impressionable. She has no need of either power or initiative in
thought, but she must have kindness, elegance, tenderness, coquetry,
and that faculty of assimilation which, in a little while, raises her
to an equality with him who shared her life. Her greatest quality must
be tact, that subtle sense which is to the mind what touch is to the
body. It reveals to her a thousand little things, contours, angles,
and forms in the intellectual order.

Very frequently pretty women have not intellect to correspond with
their personal charms. Now the slightest lack of harmony strikes me
and pains me at the first glance. In friendship, this is not of
importance. Friendship is a compact in which one fairly divides
defects and merits. We may judge of friends, whether man or woman,
take into account the good they possess, neglect the evil that is in
them, and appreciate their value exactly, while giving ourselves up to
an intimate sympathy of a deep and fascinating character.

In order to love, one must be blind, surrender oneself absolutely, see
nothing, reason on nothing, understand nothing. One must adorn the
weakness as well as the