From suspicion to condemnation or acquittal, between sincere lovers, the path cannot and must not be a long one; to a frank question, a frank answer; let suspicion or love die, but they should die in a hurricane or in a battle, die a violent death; they should not drag a miserable existence between the courts and the prisons. A hundred times better a lightning that kills us than the feverish jaundice which consumes the stamina of our lives, poisons all sources of our joy. Jealousy, besides, as it has already largely declined in monogamous society, will continue to decrease in the future, when matrimony shall be but the sanctification of love, when the choice shall be always reciprocal, when in the moral relations between the two sexes all trace of hypocrisy shall have disappeared. To know that we are loved, esteemed, and to love and esteem our companion, deeply and sincerely, is the surest guarantee of defense against that sordid parasite, that wood-worm of love which is jealousy. Let woman cease to be a slave or a freedwoman, let the husband or lover cease to be the proprietor of a woman, and all those lepers of love, the jealousy-mad, will disappear at once. Self-esteem, independent of jealousy, has many legitimate relations to love, of which it enriches the treasures. No man, no woman in the world, knowing that he or she is loved by a most noble creature, can help feeling proud; and if a delicate reserve prohibits our heralding our good fortune, we can, however, relish the secret joy of knowing that the world envies us. It is almost always beyond human strength to renounce these joys, which can be delighted in without humiliating others and without any shadow of rancor. Woman, especially, with admirable art, knows how to say countless things silently; and when she is proud of a noble love, she radiates such an aureole of light as to dazzle the adorer and the apathetic. With the majesty of a queen and the reserve of a woman, and without opening her lips, she can say to all: "Envy me; I am loved!" Holy and just and chaste pride, which I wish all the daughters of Eve who shall have deserved love should feel. Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers and famous beauties may be objects of luxury, as are horses and palaces; and it is natural for human vanity to seek those things and to appreciate and utilize them to humiliate those who have them not. Vanity uses love, then, as a pretext; and many women, incapable of loving, may conquer men solely as trophies of war, just as men oftener than women may, through pure vanity, undertake a war of conquest. All these facts, however, belong to the history of pride and vanity, and we have already dealt with them in our study on the sources of love.