After spending something like forty
thousand francs, every folly had brought Lucien back with increased
eagerness to La Torpille; he searched for her persistently; and as he
could not find her, she became to him what game is to the sportsman.

Could Herrera understand the nature of a poet's love?

When once this feeling has mounted to the brain of one of these great
little men, after firing his heart and absorbing his senses, the poet
becomes as far superior to humanity through love as he already is
through the power of his imagination. A freak of intellectual heredity
has given him the faculty of expressing nature by imagery, to which he
gives the stamp both of sentiment and of thought, and he lends his love
the wings of his spirit; he feels, and he paints, he acts and meditates,
he multiplies his sensations by thought, present felicity becomes
threefold through aspiration for the future and memory of the past; and
with it he mingles the exquisite delights of the soul, which makes him
the prince of artists. Then the poet's passion becomes a fine poem in
which human proportion is often set at nought. Does not the poet then
place his mistress far higher than women crave to sit? Like the sublime
Knight of la Mancha, he transfigures a peasant girl to be a princess.
He uses for his own behoof the wand with which he touches everything,
turning it into a wonder, and thus enhances the pleasure of loving by
the glorious glamour of the ideal.

Such a love is the very essence of passion. It is extreme in all things,
in its hopes, in its despair, in its rage, in its melancholy, in its
joy; it flies, it leaps, it crawls; it is not like any of the emotions
known to ordinary men; it is to everyday love what the perennial Alpine
torrent is to the lowland brook.

These splendid geniuses are so rarely understood that they spend
themselves in hopes deceived; they are exhausted by the search for their
ideal mistress, and almost always die like gorgeous insects splendidly
adorned for their love-festival by the most poetical of nature's
inventions, and crushed under the foot of a passer-by. But there is
another danger! When they meet with the form that answers to their soul,
and which not unfrequently is that of a baker's wife, they do as Raphael
did, as the beautiful insect does, they die in the Fornarina's arms.

Lucien was at this pass. His poetical temperament, excessive in all
things, in good as in evil, had discerned the angel in