If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love, probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: "Love is inconstant; love is a liar." If, on the other hand, you consult the gloomy volumes in which man gathers the statistics of his crimes, you will find several columns bristling with figures indicating the large number of suicides and homicides for love; you will find no records of inconstancy, and but rarely, scattered here and there, some cases of adultery. The jurymen, then, that amorphous and chaotic mass in which every idea of right and wrong dissolves and vanishes, always deal very leniently with crimes for which the code would send the culprit to death or to prison for life, and they often acquit the man who has turned murderer for love. In none of the human institutions is such impenetrable darkness as in the field of love, where an intricate mass of reticences, contradictions, tolerations and cruelties causes common sense to stumble at every step and, what is worse, offends and wounds the sentiment of justice. It is a written law that adultery is a crime to be punished with the gravest penalties, but in actual life adultery is the most common and most venial sin ever known; it is not only tolerated, but fêted and almost accepted as a social institution. The incitement to prostitution is considered a very serious crime, but many legislators sell their daughters to a rich husband who cannot love her, never will love her and will drive her to adultery with the force of irresistible necessity. And is this not prostitution? Man is either not worthy of the laws which he has imposed on himself, or he is rambling in a labyrinth of maniacal vertigo; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a shameless liar. Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite. He proclaims solemnly to the four winds that he is a son of God and that he inhabits the earth by chance and temporarily; born in Olympus, he will return there soon and forever. He is a god on vacation who condescends to play and eat with the peasants, but he is winged and lives only on ideals. A moment later he forgets his proclamations, his braggardism and shows more than ever that he is an animal of the soil; he sees the painful contrast between what he has said and what he has done, covers himself and goes into hiding. Such is the eternal formula of his eternal contradictions. In love he lies more frequently and more brazenly than in any other case. He has supposed for a moment that love, too, could be just and hence measured on the same scale as the other sentiments, and above all leveled by the common yoke of the other affections. And yet love may possess all virtues; it may be merciful, heroic, kind, generous, but it can never be just; born in injustice, it lives on injustice and dies of injustice; it has but one right--strength; it possesses only one weapon--arrogance.