In my opinion, love is today a liar from head to foot; a liar when it swears and when it forswears; a liar when, a hundred times a day, it pronounces the words _eternal_, _eternity_, _eternally_; it is a liar in law and in life; it is unfaithful, a thief, a traitor, solely because it is a liar. I may have a _Scipionian mania_, the fixed idea of a _delenda Carthago_; but if I should have to answer the questions: "Which are the true, the great loves?" "Which are the happy loves?" I would reply without hesitation: "The sincere." All the faults of love are all lies; almost all the misfortunes of love are the offspring of untruth; and, finally, adultery is nothing but the most infamous of love's lies. "What is," I will ask in turn, "the only remedy for unhappy loves, the only anchor of salvation for betrayed loves?" "Sincerity, sincerity, nothing but sincerity." At the risk of seeing many disciples and many masters of love smile skeptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she loves, lies less than we do, and during the life of love she is less unfaithful than we are. Man, in his first declaration, even when quite sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite affection; while woman, more modest, more timid, more reserved, answers that she does not love yet; that she has not yet consulted her heart; that, perhaps, she will love. The less one swears, the less one forswears; and if a holy horror may deprive speech of some fiery accent and some amorous expansion of inebriating expressions, it nevertheless stamps it with virile dignity which makes it blessed among women, while it gives the sexual relations a character of tender reserve and delicate serenity. Man often uses the "eternal oaths" as weapons of seduction, and parades them at every hour as a measure of the bottomless depths of his love; but sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because nothing so boldly generates eternity and infinity as does armed desire. It is only too true, however, that the hasty and imprudent vow is a fruitful father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of infidelity. Very few are the eternal loves, as are geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos. We all anxiously climb the mountain of the ideal, but few can get a branch or a leaf of the sacred tree. Some loves of the lower orders last years; others, months; some of them are as transient as the ephemera, for which long is the life of a day. Now, frankness can give all loves the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man can die without amorous remorse if his loves were all honest. He has loved much and fleetingly, but he has never lied, never betrayed anybody, never perjured himself.