Ask the most fortunate of women if she has not often felt impelled to reconquer a love that threatened to fly away. She jealously conceals the numberless stratagems with which she warmed the tepid, aroused the sleeping, caused the wearied to smile, made hungry and thirsty him who had the happy misfortune of overgorging himself at the banquet of voluptuousness. Man is, by nature, polygamous, more unfaithful, more brutal, more capricious, more licentious than woman, and it is her duty to make him monogamous, faithful, constantly tender and modestly virile. If it is true that man attacks and conquers, it is also very true that nature assigns to woman the more difficult task of keeping the conquest, of being the vestal of that fire which man has nearly always been the first to kindle. This is perhaps the most common formula that expresses the different missions which man and woman have in love. To us to kindle the fire, to our companion to keep it burning. By all that you hold most sacred on earth, do not be so brutal as to record the embrace among the rights and duties of love. This is written in the code, and is daily repeated by those Boeotians for whom love is but the union of male and female. Voluptuousness should be inebriating foam that floats on the quivering wave of passion and overflows and falls irresistibly into those abysses where man loses the consciousness of existence and believes in the infinite; it cannot be a feast ordered for a stated hour, much less a tribute exacted with the rudeness of a tax collector. How many delicate loves were extinguished by the sacrilegious hand of an arrogant desire, which would assume the air of command and tread the ground with the iron boot of an alleged right! No; the embrace is not a right and much less a duty: it is a unanimous consent of two powerful energies that seek each other through infinite space and, suavely struggling against each other, die together in an ocean of sweetness. Sincerity and fidelity, which are after all an identical thing and constitute the entire code of love, should never be on the lips of two lovers, and the words _right_ and _duty_ should be debarred from the amorous vocabulary. Who ever loses his time in discussing the beauties of the sun? Who doubts that air is necessary to live? When certain things begin to be discussed, they are already in serious danger of being lost; and if a continuous, vexatious investigation should at every hour cast the shadow of doubt upon the faithfulness of one's companion, the latter would have the right of feeling wretchedly loved or at least cruelly loved. I do not fear sudden anger between two lovers, or the querulous and tender lamentations; but I have a deep horror of every question about right and duty. When these discourses appear on the horizon, I always see at the same time dark clouds massing; I see looming up the horns of Balzac's tawny moon.