_Sensual Love._--This is one of the most ardent, most inebriating, most tenacious of loves, because it springs from the most fruitful and spontaneous source of sensual affections. It is the most sincere and most powerful of loves, because it satisfies one of the most natural and most irresistible needs of man; but its foundation rests on a shifting ground: beauty; and its ardors are indicated by too deep a note: desire. It never lies; it does not wrap itself in the hundred cloaks of amorous hypocrisy, but is nude, entirely nude and, in its nudity, often modest. Brazen or tender, insatiable or satisfied, rash to the point of insolence, it is, however, always itself: the tremendous attraction of two great and opposite organic units; a burning thirst that seeks the cool water of the Alpine spring; the most vigorous clash of the two most gigantic forces in the world of the living. From voluptuousness to voluptuousness, if youthful strength does not accompany it, it usually slides into lasciviousness, where it sinks deeper each day that passes and with the decline of each force; and down, down it plunges until it reaches the filth of domestic libertinism or that of the wandering Venus. It is inexhaustible in discoveries and inventions, indefatigable in voluptuousness; it is also a sublime artist; it may emit high musical notes of tenderness and show warm and fascinating tints. Born in the lowest depths of the animal man, it rarely rises to the high spheres of the ideal and knows no dignity, no delicacy, no heroism; rather, it is often suppliant to the point of baseness, impure to nausea. It accepts a bone to gnaw, just as it accepts voluptuousness without love. It does not matter to sensual love whether voluptuousness is reached by the sole moral path of love, but it accepts it also through this way, it seeks it by all possible ways. And it conquers, steals, buys love; it goes even so far as to borrow it, to commit forgery, provided it gets it. Let its insatiable prurience be but appeased and sensual love will act as mediator or pander for the loves of others, become usurer, thief and forger with the same callousness. This love is generally masculine: in women, even licentiousness always dons a splendid robe of sentiment and hides its too insolent nudity.