or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of
pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always
precludes the enjoyment of all others. Now, love is the least keen and
the least durable of our pleasures. In what would you say the pleasure
of love consists? Does it lie in the beauty of the beloved? In one
evening you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques; but at the
end of a month you will in this way have burnt out all your sentiment
for all time. Would you love a women because she is well dressed,
elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit? Do not call
this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism. Do you love her because
she is intellectual? You are in that case merely obeying the dictates
of literary sentiment."

"But," I said, "love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in
one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls,
their lives--"

"Oh dear, dear!" cried the old man, in a jeering tone. "Can you show
me five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I
do not say their life, for that is a slight thing,--the price of a
human life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs;
and there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave
men who would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven
men have sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have
slept in solitude for a whole night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are still
rarer than is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments
proceed from an unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to
consider love as a passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all
and the most contemptible. It promises everything, and fulfils
nothing. It comes, like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the
first. Ah, talk to me of revenge, hatred, avarice, of gaming, of
ambition, of fanaticism. These passions have something virile in them;
these sentiments are imperishable; they make sacrifices every day,
such as love only makes by fits and starts. But," he went on, "suppose
you abjure love. At first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties,
no worry, none of those little vexations that waste human life. A man
lives happy and tranquil; in his social relations he becomes
infinitely more powerful and influential. This divorce from the thing
called love is the primary secret of power in all