The young man asks for love on his knees, but knows that he is legitimately entitled to it, and often from the humble position of a beggar of alms, prostrated in the dust, he leaps to his feet, demanding with the force of beauty, genius, passion, that which he could not obtain by humility. A mature man, on the contrary, has lost many rights, and his requests are made with greater constraint, with a reserve full of grace and delicacy; he often implores with a tenderness so ardent and a tone so supplicatory that it is difficult to answer with a refusal. The continual alternation of an authority that teaches and an authority that implores gives the adult love the most characteristic hue, the most conspicuous mark. And when poor nature, medicated by art, has succeeded in attaining love, the precious affection firmly fixes itself on it and thrusts its roots into the deepest recesses of the heart. The adult has tenacious passions, and none is more faithful in love than he; often, conditions being equal, he is the best husband, and not only through egotism does the bridegroom seek a bride a few years younger than himself. Man grows old later than woman, and two ignorant and very young people seldom wed without exposing themselves to the most serious dangers. The woman of thirty, also, loves with modesty, with deep tenderness, with religious fidelity, with avaricious sagacity. The man who is growing old is the trunk of a tree on which every day a branch withers, and from which every gust of wind detaches a handful of yellow leaves. When the entire tree is dead, then upon the ruins of love rises an implacable hatred for those who love and are loved; the cruel domestic inquisitions and a posthumous, ridiculous ostentation of forced continence or mummified modesty will then poison the existence of the intolerant old man, who avenges himself upon the young people for his misfortune in not being longer able to love. It is an inexorable law which condemns those old men to mystic and wrathful meditations, because in all times and in all countries the last spark of lust serves to light the bilious taper on the altar of superstition. Most unfortunate is the poor young girl who must have as a confidante of her first loves an irascible and bigoted old woman, to whom love is a synonym of lechery and affection a sin. Less monstrous and less cruel is the deformity of a Chinese foot than the contortions which a youthful love must undergo in the hooked and yellow clutches of intolerant bigotry.