_Ferocious Love._--Perhaps the term which is applied to this love is stronger than it should be; but in painting a psychical picture one is irresistibly inclined to exaggerate the coloring or the outlines and give the subject more relief than it has in nature. Abnormal development of the sense of ownership, amplified by conceit and joined to a certain impetuosity of character: such is the most natural source of all those violent loves which I class under the common name of "ferocious love." Its birth is nearly always like the eruption of a volcano and accompanied by so many storms and fits of affection and such clashing of energies that one would suppose that, instead of a love, a hatred had come into existence. And this original sin follows it through life, and ends only with death. We see this love distribute handshakes with such strength that we say they are tetanic convulsions, kisses that seem bites, embraces that look like homicides; and we behold it as a tyrant without jealousy, a fury without anger, insatiable even after possession, because voluptuousness does not calm nor fidelity always satisfy it. Venus triumphant and not disarmed would represent this love in all the sublime greatness of its forces. If kindness of habits or the patient file of education does not succeed in smoothing its angles, it often becomes rugged and even brutal. So must have loved our most remote ancestors of the caves and the palisades, who continuously bathed in the blood of hunt and war and stained their hands with blood in love as well, as woman also was the prey belonging to the strongest and most audacious. As it is easy to imagine, man generally is the one who loves ferociously; but woman, too, occasionally feels this cruel form of love; and the more attached she is to her lover, the more she torments him and the deeper she plunges the claws of her passion into the depths of his body to feel its heat and to say with voluptuous fury: "This, too, is mine!"