[Pg 7] Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula. Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and _Manon Lescaut_, have been written in France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches its full height scarcely ever. What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it described--without ever feeling it--in hundreds of celebrated volumes, what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness? I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness." Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase behind the other books--I should even leave a few pages uncut. 'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily, [Pg 8] those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet to possess enough penetration to judge _a priori_ of the degree of exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered description of these weaknesses.