The petty considerations of pride and worldly proprieties are the cause of many women's unhappiness, for, through pride, their parents have placed them in their abominable position. Destiny has reserved for them, as a consolation far superior to all their misfortunes, the happiness of loving and being loved with passion, when suddenly one fine day they borrow from the enemy this same mad pride, of which they were the first victims--all to kill the one happiness which is left them, to work their own misfortune and the misfortune of him, who loves them. A friend, who has had ten famous intrigues (and by no means all one after another), gravely persuades them that if they fall in love, they will be dishonoured in the eyes of the public, and yet this worthy public, who never rises above low ideas, gives them generously a lover a year; because that, it says, "is the thing." Thus the soul is saddened by this odd spectacle: a woman of feeling, supremely refined and an angel of purity, on the advice of a low t----, runs away from the boundless, the only happiness which is left to her, in order to appear in a dress of dazzling white, before a great fat brute of a judge, whom everyone knows has been blind a hundred years, and who bawls out at the top of his voice: "She is dressed in black!" [Pg 103] CHAPTER XXXI EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF SALVIATI Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit. (_Propertius_, II, I.) Bologna, _April 29th_, 1818. Driven to despair by the misfortune to which love has reduced me, I curse existence. I have no heart for anything. The weather is dull; it is raining, and a late spell of cold has come again to sadden nature, who after a long winter was hurrying to meet the spring. Schiassetti, a half-pay colonel, my cold and reasonable friend, came to spend a couple of hours with me "You should renounce your love." "How? Give me back my passion for war." "It is a great misfortune for you to have known her." I agree very nearly--so low-spirited and craven do I feel--so much has melancholy taken possession of me to-day. We discuss what interest can have led her friend to libel me, but find nothing but that old Neapolitan proverb: "Woman, whom love and youth desert, a nothing piques." What is certain is that that cruel woman is _enraged_ with me--it is the expression of one of her friends. I could revenge myself in a fearful way, but, against her hatred, I am without the smallest means of defence. Schiassetti leaves me. I go out into the rain, not knowing what to do with myself. My rooms, this drawing-room, which I lived in during the first days of our acquaintance, and when I saw her every evening, have become insupportable to me. Each engraving, each piece of furniture, brings up again the [Pg 104] happiness I dreamed of in their presence--which now I have lost for ever.