obey also
the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If
he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love
sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.

But to feel this passion is always to feel desire. Can a man always
desire his wife?

Yes.

It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the
same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed
several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a
charming melody.

Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which
is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either
it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and
goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the
child of heaven and earth.

Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything
with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three
arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this
investigation for the next century to carry out.

If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression,
pleasure should be even more diversified. For in the three arts which
aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy,
the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of
two bodies and of two souls. If the three principal methods upon which
we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those
whom nature has made poets, musicians or painters, is it not obvious
that, in order, to be happy, it is necessary to be initiated into the
secrets of pleasure? All men experience the craving for reproduction,
as all feel hunger and thirst; but all are not called to be lovers
and gastronomists. Our present civilization has proved that taste is a
science, and it is only certain privileged beings who have learned how
to eat and drink. Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its
physiologists. As for ourselves, we are contented with pointing out that
ignorance of the principles upon which happiness is founded, is the sole
cause of that misfortune which is the lot of all the predestined.

It is with the greatest timidity that we venture upon the publication
of a few aphorisms which may give birth to this new art, as casts have
created the science of geology; and we offer them for the meditation of
philosophers,