Power does not consist in striking hard and often, but in striking with justice. To stroll about the streets is in itself a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. Nowadays, to be hopelessly in love, or to be wearied of life, constitutes social position. Love is immense, but it is not infinite, while science has limitless depths. Prosperity brings with it an intoxication, which inferior natures never resist. It is but the heart that does not age. The graces of manner and conversation are gifts of nature, or the fruit of an education begun at the cradle. As soon as a misfortune occurs, some friend or other is always ready to tell us, and to run a dagger into our hearts, while expecting us to admire the handle. It is frequently at the very moment when men most despair of their future that their fortune begins. To talk of love is to make love. A married woman is a slave who needs a throne. The grandeur of desires is in proportion to the breadth of the imagination. A husband who leaves nothing to be desired is lost. There is no greater incentive to life than the conviction that our death would bring happiness to others. Where there is no self-respect solitude is hateful. A lover has all the virtues and all the defects that a husband has not. The more one judges the less one loves. Chance is the great romancer; to be prolific one has but to study it. Grief as well as pleasure has its initiation. Apart from the comedian, the prince, and the cardinal, there is a man at once prince and comedian,—a man robed in magnificent vestments. I speak of the poet, who appears to do nothing, yet who reigns above humanity when he has known how to depict it. Woman’s virtue is perhaps a question of temperament. To live by the pen is a labor which galley-slaves would refuse; they would prefer death. To live by the pen consists in creating,—creating to-day, to-morrow, forever, ... or to appear to, and the appearance costs as much as the reality. I have never seen a badly dressed woman who was agreeable and good-humored. A woman’s instinct is equivalent to the perspicacity of the wise. In France, a witticism is to be heard on the scaffold as well as at the barricades, and some Frenchman or other will, I am sure, joke at the general sessions of the last judgment. All soldiers look alike. In love, chance is the providence of women. Literature and politics are to women to-day that which religion was to them formerly,—the last asylum of their pretensions. True sentiments are magnetic. Misfortune creates in certain natures a vast desert, which reëchoes with the voice of God. It is from the shock of characters, and not from conflict of ideas, that antipathies are born. When intelligent men begin to explain their dispositions or give the key to their hearts they are most assuredly drunk. There are but few moral wounds which solitude cannot cure.