The Orientals sequestrate their women. A woman who loves should sequestrate herself. A cornice is the sweetest, the most submissive, the most indulgent confidant that a woman can find when she does not dare to look her interlocutor in the face. The cornice of a boudoir is an institution. It is a confessional minus the priest. True love appears in but one of two ways: either at first sight, which is doubtless an effect of second sight; or else in the gradual fusion of two natures, which is the realization of Plato’s androgyne. A mother’s heart is an abyss in whose depths forgiveness is always to be found. The practice of religion sometimes causes a mental ophthalmia. Life is made up of varied accidents, of alternating griefs and joys. Dante’s Paradise, that changeless blue and sublime expression of the ideal, is to be found but in the soul; and to demand it from the actualities of existence is a luxury against which nature hourly protests. It is despair, not hope, which gives the real measure of our ambitions. We give ourselves up in secret to the beautiful poems of hope, but grief stands before us, unveiled. The most ordinary and respectable of men will, when with others, try to appear the rake. Human justice is, I think, the development of the thought which floats through space. Through an inexplicable phenomenon, there are many who have hope, but are lacking in faith. Hope is the flower of desire; faith is the fruit of certainty. A petty work engenders pride, while modesty is born of great achievements. The problem of eternal beatitude is one whose solution is known but to God. Here below, poets bore their readers to death with their pictures of Paradise. It costs more to satisfy a vice than to feed a family. A husband should never permit himself to say anything against his wife in the presence of a third person. Love prefers contrasts to similitudes. The sentiment of wrong doing is in proportion to the purity of the conscience, and an act which to one is barely a fault will assume to another the dimensions of a crime. Woman lives by sentiment, where man lives by action. Probity, like virtue, should be divided into two classes: to wit, negative and positive. The former would refer to those who are honest so long as no occasion to enrich themselves is offered; while the latter would refer to those who face temptation and resist it. Woman, as a rule, feels, enjoys, and judges successively; hence, three distinct periods, of which the last coincides with the melancholy approach of old age. A lover is never in the wrong. Distrust a woman who speaks of her virtue. In love, there is nothing so persuasive as courageous stupidity. Weak natures are reassured as easily as they are alarmed. The most incurable wounds are those which are made by the tongue or the eye, by mockery or by disdain. To two lovers the rest of the world is but landscape. Expiation is not obliteration.