Those young men who adapt themselves too easily to this ignominious and degrading compromise with their conscience are cruelly punished for their crime, since they will not know the richest and most splendid treasures of youthful love. Do not lie, do not betray; do not seek your love in the mire, but in the sky; and then abandon your heart and senses to the wave that carries you to paradise. Inhale all the perfumes, pick all the flowers of a garden over which no winter breeze ever blows, and where for every petal that falls a hundred new corollas blossom. Be rich, be recklessly rich; be gods at least once in your life: nature concedes a day of spring even to the most miserable creature and weaves a garland on the head of the lowliest of men. Remember, there is no coffer in which an hour of sunlight can be kept, no artifice of chemical science that can preserve a blooming rose. The fortunate young man who has not subjected his love to the process of decomposition we have described loves ardently, recklessly, splendidly. His love is a sunny day in May, without clouds, without chills, without sorrows; it is a feast where weariness, fatigue and delusions are unknown. He lives because he loves, and he loves because he lives. He burns his incense to the goddess, but he is chaste and knows very little of lasciviousness. He is sometimes so pure as to call a blush on the face of a woman who, being in her thirties, already loves too knowingly. He neither measures nor weighs; and who has ever dared to reduce to a mathematical formula the force of a thunderbolt or the kilogrammeters of an earthquake? And the loves of a young man are thunderbolts or earthquakes. A young man is not very jealous; he is less so, in any case, than the adult and the old; he is too confident, too happy to doubt; and, besides, he has no time! His lips are wreathed in a perpetual smile; a golden ray of sunlight rests on his brow like a halo of bliss. There is no tomorrow for him except under the form of a continuation of the happiness of today; he does not remember the past, and in good faith believes himself to have always loved his goddess, even when he did not know her. He believes in inborn loves, as the philosopher of old used to believe in congenital ideas. O happy youth!