After this preamble, I am going bravely to enter into the examination of facts which, I am convinced, have rarely been observed at Paris. But after all at Paris, superior as of course it is to all other towns, orange-trees are not seen growing out in the open, as at Sorrento, and it is there that Lisio Visconti observed and noted the following facts--at Sorrento, the country of Tasso, on the Bay of Naples in a position half-way down to the sea, still more picturesque than that of Naples itself, but where no one reads the _Miroir_. When we are to see in the evening the woman we love, the suspense, the expectation of so great a happiness makes every moment, which separates us from it, unbearable. A devouring fever makes us take up and lay aside twenty different occupations. We look every moment at our watch--overjoyed when we see that we have managed to pass ten minutes without looking at the time. The hour so longed-for strikes at last, and when we are at her door ready to knock--we would be glad not to find her in. It is only on reflexion that we would be sorry for it. In a word, the suspense before seeing her produces an unpleasant effect. There you have one of the things which make good folk say that love drives men silly. The reason is that the imagination, violently withdrawn from dreams of delight in which every step forward brings happiness, is brought back face to face with severe reality. The gentle soul knows well that in the combat which is to begin the moment he sees her, the least inadvertency, the least lack of attention or of courage will be paid for by a defeat, poisoning, for a long time to come, the dreams of fancy and of passion, and humiliating to a man's pride, if he try to find consolation outside the [Pg 73] sphere of passion. He says to himself: "I hadn't the wit, I hadn't the pluck"; but the only way to have pluck before the loved one is by loving her a little less. It is a fragment of attention, torn by force with so much trouble from the dreams of crystallisation, which allows the crowd of things to escape us during our first words with the woman we love--things which have no sense or which have a sense contrary to what we mean--or else, what is still more heartrending, we exaggerate our feelings and they become ridiculous in our own eyes. We feel vaguely that we are not paying enough attention to our words and mechanically set about polishing and loading our oratory. And, also, it is impossible to hold one's tongue--silence would be embarrassing and make it still less possible to give one's thoughts to her. So we say in a feeling way a host of things that we do not feel, and would be quite embarrassed to repeat, obstinately keeping our distance from the woman before us, in order more really to be with her. In the early hours of my acquaintance with love, this oddity which I felt within me, made me believe that I did not love.