What mass of meditations, what abysses of desperation are gathered in a few seconds in the head of a woman caressed by a man whom she does not love! What eloquence in silence, that silence which Ovid, the libertine, eagerly advised women to avoid! Often does a man press to his bosom a creature who does not love him and whom he too heedlessly prostitutes, while the victim meditates a long, cruel revenge. More than one adultery, more than one assassination was conceived, discussed, vowed in that moment when man, enjoying the supreme bliss, believed to have in his arms a happy creature. More than one embrace has generated twins, a new man and a new hatred; a tenacious and bitter hatred, which only the death of the one who hates can extinguish, since it often survives the death of its object. O men, you who see in love a cup to empty, and find in matrimony only an association of two capitals or a mechanism for reproducing the species, remember that for many creatures love is the first and the last of passions, the first and the last of joys; and remember that for very many women, whom you neglect and perhaps despise, love is all of life. There is no nature so unhappy that its distress could not be relieved by another nature capable of mending the shreds of the heart, tempering the bitterness, straightening the rachitic limbs. There is no man, born weak or sickly, who could not become robust if he only should live in a climate, be supplied with food and surrounded with the physical and moral atmosphere that agrees with him. And I believe that the same can apply to love. If we could dedicate half a century to the search for the right woman, if Diogenes' lantern could be fitted with the electric light which modern science concedes to us, certainly among the thousand millions of human beings who tread this planet we could and should be able to find the woman who would be happy with us and make us happy. Unfortunately, life is too short and love is too rapid and exacting in its desires to make such a search possible; and even for the most fortunate and wisest creatures a part of happiness is always among the unknown quantities determined by chance and not by reflection. Hence many and beautiful natures are tied by love-knots, and still are not happy because characters fit each other on many sides of the human polygon but not on all. The study of these contrasts, of these partial incompatibilities would require the moral analysis of the entire man, of all his social vicissitudes, while many of those sorrows do not belong solely to love, but spring from all human affections and poison friendship, fraternal, filial and paternal loves; some of them, however, are peculiar to the love of loves.