ined by the imagination of the
troubadours, set their seal and sanction upon this truth.

LVIII.
We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting
in proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost
us.

All our meditations have revealed to us about the basis of the
primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is
at the same time the principle and the result of the law.

LIX.
In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.

This last principle is so self-evident that we will not attempt to
demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to us
of some importance. The writer who said: "Everything is true, and
everything is false," announced a fact which the human intellect,
naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really
seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds
that contemplate them. This fact may be detailed as follows:

There cannot be found, in all creation, a single law which is not
counterbalanced by a law exactly contrary to it; life in everything is
maintained by the equilibrium of two opposing forces. So in the
present subject, as regards love, if you give too much, you will not
receive enough. The mother who shows her children her whole tenderness
calls forth their ingratitude, and ingratitude is occasioned, perhaps,
by the impossibility of reciprocation. The wife who loves more than
she is loved must necessarily be the object of tyranny. Durable love
is that which always keeps the forces of two human beings in
equilibrium. Now this equilibrium may be maintained permanently; the
one who loves the more ought to stop at the point of the one who loves
the less. And is it not, after all the sweetest sacrifice that a
loving heart can make, that love should so accommodate itself as to
adjust the inequality?

What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher on
discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the
world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections
are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers
to bloom, the universe to teem with life!

Perhaps, we ought to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for
the following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the
question of honeymoons and of Red-moons: