_Excoriated Love._--Because of its origins, this form of love is often confounded with the preceding; but it is still more unhappy and rightfully belongs to the pathology of the heart. It is a love that can be sincere, tender and passionate; but it is so irritable and such a grumbler that a mosquito would annoy it and a pebble in its path cause it to cry against misfortune and treachery. Like the Epicurean of old, it cannot sleep unless a folded rose-leaf is placed in its bed. It also seeks, like all human affections, the goal of its aspirations; but never reaches it, because suspicion, susceptibility and fear stop it at every step, freeze the words on its lips, weaken its arms in the embrace, extinguish its flame when hardly lighted. I compare this affection with a St. Bartholomew obliged to walk among brambles and over rocks bristling with points, and for this reason I have given it the strange and new name of _excoriated love_; the French would call it _un amour mauvais coucheur_. It is perhaps the most wretched of loves, because, besides the natural misfortunes which are the inevitable lot of every daughter of Eve and every son of Adam, it creates its own troubles and enlarges them with the lens of the most unhappy imagination. Excoriated love is a fatal still which transforms rose-petals into poison-ivy, honey into wormwood, aroma into fetidness, nourishment into venom. If kissed, it murmurs because the kiss was too violent or too cold; if caressed, it suspects that the caress may have had a second end in view. Even in the ecstasies of creation it would ask of the Creator why He had made the light so soon or so late. Whoever is loved by these unfortunates has always the right to address them with the words of the courtesan of Venice to the unhappy and mad philosopher of Geneva: "_Zaneto, Zaneto, ti non ti xe fato per far a l'amor!_" ("Johnny, Johnny, you are not made to make love!") And yet these unfortunate creatures love, and love deeply; and it is the enviable glory of powerful lovers to cure and win them over to the point of making them confess that at least once in their lives they were truly, faithfully and passionately loved. It is one of the most admirable triumphs of the amatory art to find a fabric so fine that it can touch the excoriated flesh of those poor unfortunates, and create for them an artificial atmosphere, in which they may be able to move without groaning, breathe without coughing, and live without cursing life. These forms of love, which I have poorly outlined, are but rarely found in nature in a simple state, but are complicated and interwoven with each other, forming a thousand pictures: a real mine of resources for art, a veritable treasure of torments for the psychological thinker. No man loves like another and no man loves perfectly, in the manner in which the type of a sublime love can be idealized in the regions of thought of our brain.