Sometimes lies are told through compassion, and woman, more frequently than we, striving in vain to keep alive a dying love, is loath to inflict a cruel wound on the companion who still loves her, and endeavors with a mighty effort to deceive herself and him, until through habit of hypocrisy she succeeds in feigning a love that no longer exists; and from lie to betrayal the road is short and slippery. The lie at first was merciful, then it grew into a habit, and at last became transformed into a crime. No; lovers or husbands, companions of voluptuousness or vestals of the family, never tell an untruth, even when it is suggested to you by pity. It is hard, cruel, to see the blooming tree of a happy passion felled by a sudden hurricane; tremendous is the rending of a heart that breaks in a day under the shock of an atrocious blight; but these sorrows do not debase us, and, although capable of killing, do not humiliate us. Love killed by violence remains stretched on the ground as beautiful as a thunderstruck angel, and memory weaves a wreath for him and with the most precious aromas and balsams preserves him from putrefaction. Love killed by the lingering tabes of a secret betrayal, is a leper who dies in the fetidness of a hospital, a horror to himself and to the others; a corpse slowly corroded by phthisis and scrofula, leaving no trace whatever of the time when he, too, was a young and robust organism. False and cruel is the pity that causes us to simulate a love which no longer exists. No sorrow is greater than that which deception inflicts upon us; love, self-esteem, self-love, love of ownership, all the warmest and most powerful of human affections, are pierced with a hundred stabs at the same time, and the pain is so intense that it poisons all our life with wormwood and gall. How beautiful, instead, how sublime is a love that, without swearing eternity or infinity, lasts eternal and infinite as long as two human hearts throb together; how beautiful is a love that needs no chains and lives on faith and liberty! To love means to be all of another; to be loved means to have become a living part of another: the lie begins when, with cynical licentiousness, the man or the woman is divided in two parts, and the body is given to one, the soul, as it were, to the other. Love is a whole that cannot be divided without being killed, and, unless voluptuousness is reduced to a plain question of hygiene, one cannot love two human creatures at the same time with that sentiment which for its superiority over all other affections is called love, without betraying both. I hold in much higher estimation a woman who, after a long career of facile loves, can say, "I have never loved two men at the same time," than a bigoted matron who boasts of having never betrayed her duties as a spouse because with wise and cautious lechery she knows how to sell voluptuousness without seriously compromising the property reserved for the husband.