I invite the studious young man to withdraw, if in the same year as the industrial gained a hundred thousand francs, he has acquired the knowledge of modern Greek, and is so proud of it that already he aspires to Arabic. I beg not to open this book every man, who has not been unhappy for imaginary reasons, reasons to which vanity is stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in the _salons_. I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of these very _salons_ by an affectation that never lapses for an instant. Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of real feelings? In fact this work has been their _bête noire_: they say that the author must be a wretch. To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibility [Pg 6] and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of the _salon_, but in the eyes of a certain person in the _salon_; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)--or even to enter the _salon_ where the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself--these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change in the tariff of Columbia.[2] The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak, the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called the Passion of Love. Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical figure, but on one condition--that it exists already on the blackboard, for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling, something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can a passion be seen? This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.