indulgence who hovers over the worlds does
not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so
little success attended the first.

Here then we have a people, a society which has been sifted, and you see
the result!

XVI.
Manners are the hypocrisy of nations, and hypocrisy is more or less
perfect.

XVII.
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all the
time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so regular
as at the table.

A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of
any man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of
gastronomy.

Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving, that
science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the French alone
possess, for that science originated in this country.

Well, after all, isn't it enough to enrage all husbands when they think
that man is so endowed with an innate desire to change from one food
to another, that in some savage countries, where travelers have landed,
they have found alcoholic drinks and ragouts?

Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more
numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the
caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences
of our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us
celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking
whom we may devour.

Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search
his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of
one woman only!

How, alas! are we to explain, while respecting the honor of all the
peoples, the problem which results from the fact that three millions
of burning hearts can find no more than four hundred thousand women on
which they can feed? Should we apportion four celibates for each woman
and remember that the honest women would have already established,
instinctively and unconsciously, a sort of understanding between
themselves and the celibates, like that which the presidents of royal
courts have initiated, in order to make their partisans in each chamber
enter successively after a certain number of years?

That would be a mournful way of solving the difficult