Nature has given woman the greatest part of love, and if this difference could be expressed with figures, I would say that we were allotted one fifth, or one fourth at most, of love's territory. Only a woman could write Mme. de Staël's sublime words: "Undoubtedly, in the mysteries of nature, to love and still to love is what we have retained of our celestial inheritance." Neither civilization in any of its most varied phases, nor customs in their numberless forms, nor impositions of tyrants, nor power of genius could alter this immutable law. In the rank and fetid hut of the Eskimo, or in the palace of the prince, woman gives all of herself to man, first as daughter, then as lover, as wife, as mother. She is the great placenta of human beings, the bosom from which we draw blood, voluptuousness, love, every delight of our soul, every heat that warms us. Woe to us, if we should poison the source of human life with a pseudo-education; woe to us, if we should deny Eve the most sacred of rights! For woman, love is the first, the uppermost necessity, and all her organism and her psychology are softened and moulded by the influence of love. Van Helmont said too rudely, "_Tota mulier in utero_," but thinkers of all epochs applauded the aphorism of the Dutch physician. Woman physically desires for long time; she possesses for long time and can enjoy her conquest every day, every hour, and turn it into a warm and scented atmosphere in which she lives as in a nest; woman nurses in her bosom an angel who always ardently desires and who does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she moulds the man, nourishes and caresses him, and as the years pass she sees herself, her flesh, her loves transformed into a group of little angels who dance around her, who are bits of her heart, petals of a rose fallen from the flower of her beauty, all calling her "mother," which has the meaning of "placenta of life." From the ardent embrace of the man whom she loves she flits to the endearments of her little children; voluptuousness does not fatigue, nor ardor wither, nor passion weary her; she is all, from her hair to her feet, imbued with love, the fluid that flows in her through every vein and moistens every fiber; so that when she is deprived of it she is like the tree shattered by the hurricane and which sees every leaf wither, every flower fall. The love of man is a lightning that flashes, thunders and vanishes; the love of woman is a ray of sun which, slow and warm, penetrates her heart and fecundates her; and she absorbs it, languidly and voluptuously, and every little root of her sentiments, her joys, her thoughts imbibes and feasts upon it; so that, even after the sun has disappeared, its fruitful rays remain, hidden in the earth which it has warmed.