The perfect harmony of one love lacks a note of sensuality, that of another a tone of energy; one is too restless, another too languid, a third too violent. Even the most fortunate creatures, those who possess a just measure of voluptuousness, of sentiment and of poetry,--even those, who know they are loved ardently and faithfully, aspire to a love more perfect than that which they feel and better than that which they receive; and when this thirst for the ideal does not induce us to violate the compact of fidelity, we should not complain, because love, too, must obey the common law, which compels us ever to aspire to purer regions, richer in splendors and warmer with ardors. At early dawn love awaits the promise of a warm noon, and in the burning sultriness looks forward with eager anticipation to the cool twilight of the evening; it is spurred by that impulse which drives forward men and things, matter and force, and the bliss of today expects a more intense voluptuousness for tomorrow. If this unquenchable thirst for the better should cease in us, it would be simply because life is spent in us; if the irresistible desire for a higher love should cease, it would be simply because, as light to the blind, the heavenly regions of the ideal--those regions where numberless targets are gathered at which are aimed the glances and the arrows of the human family--have all at once been closed to us. CHAPTER XVII THE HELL OF LOVE Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean's abysses, has reserved its greatest bitterness, its most cruel torments for love. And so it was to be; the warmest passion was to turn into the most inflexible frigidity; the deepest was to precipitate itself into the somberest depths; the richest in joys to be the most fecund in sorrows. From the fleeting breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the lightning, more evanescent than a word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to the certain consciousness of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of him who for one instant awaits his beloved, to the prolonged desperation of him who can no longer wait, love evinces all the notes of affliction, all the torments of the senses, all the tortures of sentiment. Of the bones which are scattered every day on the long path through which the human family passes on this planet, many were left by love; and suicide, homicide and insanity count in cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than are reckoned in the summary statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, is for those who love with heart and mind and not with senses only. He who sees in love a question only of régime and hygiene recovers from the loss of his sweetheart with a tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with licentiousness heals every malady of the heart and drowns all his sorrows in his libertinism.