If you would rather not carry things to such tragic lengths, you must pack up and go miles away, and keep a chorus-girl, whose charms people will think have arrested you in your flight. Your rival has only to be an ordinary person and he will think you are consoled. Very often the best way is to wait without flinching, while he wears himself out in the eyes of the loved one through his own stupidity. For, except in a serious passion formed little by little and in early youth, a clever woman does not love an undistinguished man for long.[3] In the case of jealousy after intimate intercourse, there must follow also apparent indifference or real inconstancy. Plenty of women, offended with a lover whom they still love, form an attachment with the man, of whom he has shown himself jealous, and the play becomes a reality.[4] I have gone into some detail, because in these moments of jealousy one often loses one's head. Counsels, made in writing a long time ago, are useful, and, the essential [Pg 126] thing being to feign calmness, it is not out of place in a philosophical piece of writing, to adopt that tone. As your adversaries' power over you consists in taking away from you or making you hope for things, whose whole worth consists in your passion for them, once manage to make them think you are indifferent, and suddenly they are without a weapon. If you have no active course to take, but can distract yourself in looking for consolation, you will find some pleasure in reading _Othello_; it will make you doubt the most conclusive appearances. You will feast your eyes on these words:-- Trifles light as air Seem to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs from Holy Writ. (_Othello_, Act III.) It is my experience that the sight of a fine sea is consoling. The morning which had arisen calm and bright gave a pleasant effect to the waste mountain view, which was seen from the castle on looking to the landward, and the glorious ocean crisped with a thousand rippling waves of silver extended on the other side in awful, yet complacent majesty to the verge of the horizon. With such scenes of calm sublimity the human heart sympathises even in its most disturbed moods, and deeds of honour and virtue are inspired by their majestic influence. (_The Bride of Lammermoor_, Chap. VII.) I find this written by Salviati:-- _July 20th_, 1818.--I often--and I think unreasonably--apply to life as a whole the feelings of a man of ambition or a good citizen, if he finds himself set in battle to guard the baggage or in any other post without danger or action. I should have felt regret at forty to have passed the age of loving without deep passion. I should have had that bitter and humiliating displeasure, to have found out too late that I had been fool enough to let life pass, without living. Yesterday I spent three hours with the woman I love and a rival, whom she wants to make me think she favours. Certainly,