I certainly have neither strength nor courage sufficient to accompany the reader into the lower regions of the amorous hell. If you have already passed your thirtieth year, you surely must have among the memories of your past some half hour of desperation and some sleepless night which make you shudder only by recalling them; you must have suffered certain torments, compared to which Dante's infernal region will seem blooming flower-beds to you, and you must imagine that nature rarely torments one man with all the tortures of the amorous passion. In human nature some sorrows make the heart incapable of suffering certain others, and the morbid rage of jealous pride protects us against the bitter sob of a generous sorrow, just as the chaste reserve of a modest nature deprives us of the possibility of suffering the ardent thirst for certain pleasures. If you wish to open just a little the door of this hell, if you want to sound its abysses with a passing glance, imagine on one side all the hopes, all the voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the bitternesses, all the miseries. And after this cruel exposition of the joys and sorrows of love, you will not have ended yet, because the fields of sufferance are a hundred times larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one; the tortures of a man beholding the fruit near without his being able to touch it are thousands; and this example will suffice for all. Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, in its presence all the arrows of our pride lose their sharpness, all our hopes are torn, all our joys shattered. In the delirium of passion and pride we all repeat hundreds of times: "I would have her dead rather than belonging to another--a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful." And frequently the man who utters this blasphemy, his lips livid and his hair standing on end, stains his hands with blood by plunging them into the bosom of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of the heart where love and hatred, pride and love, crime and torture clash and blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But love, which truly loves, infinite love which transforms man into the half of a creature that suffers and desires, ideal love that few feel and few see dimly in the twilight of a suprasensible region which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater torture than the death of the beloved. Oh, yes; let indifference, contempt, hatred, betrayal come, but that the dear one may live. Let others have this creature whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood; let this temple, perfumed with the incense of our thoughts, with the durable love of all our passions, become the temple of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken, ourselves driven away by the rough broom of the sexton, but let the god live who sojourns there, let the idol of our life shine on the altar.