(At least, he might have divined in that environment the malice or satire of Providence against love, and, in the process of generation, a sign of original sin. In fact, we can make love only with excretory organs.) Unable to suppress love, the Church wished at least to disinfect it, and created marriage. XXVI Portrait of the literary riff-raff. Doctor Tavernus Crapulosus Pedantissimus. His portrait in the manner of Praxiteles. His pipe, his opinions, his Hegelianism, his filth, his ideas of art, his spleen, his jealousy. A fine picture of modern youth. XXVII Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen. In other words, is not creation the fall of God? Dandyism. What is the superior man? It is not the specialist. It is the man of leisure and broad education. To be rich and to love labor. XXVIII Why does the man of parts prefer maidens to women of the world, though they are equally stupid? Find this out. XXIX There are women who are like the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. They are wanted no more, because they have been sullied by certain men. Just as I would not put on the breeches of a mangy fellow. What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice. XXX Study of the great disease of horror of the home. Reasons for the disease. Indignation at the universal fatuity of all classes, of all beings, of both sexes, of every age. Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country. XXXI Of love, of the predilection of the French for military metaphors. Here every metaphor wears a moustache. Militant literature.--To man the breach.--To bear the standard aloft.--To maintain the standard high and firm.--To hurl oneself into the thick of the fight.--One of the veterans. All these fine phrases apply generally to the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the coffee-house. XXXII To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The _littérateurs_ of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society. XXXIII Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health suspends us on the future. He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me as one who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and bears them away in his fall. Before all to be a _great man_ and a saint for one's self. XXXV In the end, before all history and before the French people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that the first comer, by seizing the telegraph and the national press, can govern a great nation.