When deceived love arms itself with an homicidal knife, I class that crime among the most inevitable effects of instantaneous hatred and natural revenge; when love is imposed as a duty on a girl, and instead of love hatred is born, instead of affection contempt springs up, I remark that love cannot be ordered for a fixed hour like a dinner, and that, if infamies and bastards are born from the obscene nuptials of gold and vanity, love has nothing to do with it, because love was absent, and he who can prove an alibi is at once acquitted by the most cruel and most stubborn of public prosecutors. When I see love kill dignity, friendship, the holiest affections of the heart; when I see it breaking with furious rage the iron bars of the cage in which a cruel code of laws has imprisoned it, I acquit it instantly because love is not a wild beast that can be shut up in a menagerie, but a creature as free as air, that lives on bright light and burning suns, on the aroma of the forest and the fragrance of the meadows. You have made it hydrophobic with hunger and thirst; you have made it furious with your own violence; and you complain because the mad creature bites and kills? This is admitted to be true by universal consent; and as there is an immense inequality between what the laws require and that of which human loves are capable, men shrug their shoulders and forgive, forgive always, forgive all, even where human justice should rise in all the solemn grandeur of its majesty to protect the most sacred rights of family and society. In the codes, love is often a crime; in the paths of life, for the most rigorous individuals, it is at most a weakness--a dear, a sympathetic weakness. For me hypocrisy is a chain that ties and chokes love in modern society, and I dare affirm that the only fault, the only crime which this sentiment can commit is falsehood. Let us begin by freeing it from the leprosy which infects, devours, disgraces it, and then we shall see what remains sound beneath in that dear, nude and virginal love that Mother Nature has conceded us. Let us first save the life of this poor creature, and then we shall attend to the rest; we shall find out whether it has other misfortunes, whether it can commit other crimes besides that of lying.