[Pg 159] No language has words to express how impossible it is for a Frenchman to play the role of a deserted and desperate lover, in full view of a whole town--yet no sight is commoner at Venice or Bologna. To find love at Paris, we must descend to those classes, in which the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle against real want, have left more energy. To let oneself be seen with a great and unsatisfied desire, is to let oneself be seen in a position of inferiority--and that is impossible in France, except for people of no position at all. It means exposing oneself to all kinds of sneers--hence come the exaggerated praises bestowed on prostitutes by young men who mistrust their own hearts. A vulgar susceptibility and dread of appearing in a position of inferiority forms the principle of conversation among provincial people. Think of the man who only lately, when told of the assassination of H. R. H. the Duke of Berri(25), answered: "I knew it."[1] In the Middle Ages hearts were tempered by the presence of danger, and therein, unless I am mistaken, lies another cause of the astonishing superiority of the men of the sixteenth century. Originality, which among us is rare, comical, dangerous and often affected, was then of everyday and unadorned. Countries where even to-day danger often shows its iron hand, such as Corsica,[2] [Pg 160] Spain or Italy, can still produce great men. In those climates, where men's gall cooks for three months under the burning heat, it is activity's direction that is to seek; at Paris, I fear, it is activity itself.[3] Many young men, fine enough to be sure at Montmirail or the Bois de Boulogne, are afraid of love; and when you see them, at the age of twenty, fly the sight of a young girl who has struck them as pretty, you may know that cowardice is the real cause. When they remember what they have read in novels is expected of a lover, their blood runs cold. These chilly spirits cannot conceive how the storm of passion, which lashes the sea to waves, also fills the sails of the ship and gives her the power of riding over them. Love is a delicious flower, but one must have the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a frightful precipice. Besides ridicule, love has always staring it in the face the desperate plight of being deserted by the loved one, and in her place only a _dead blank_ for all the rest of one's life. Civilisation would be perfect, if it could continue the delicate pleasures of the nineteenth century with a more frequent presence of danger.[4]