Nor does society measure human guilt only according to the reckoning of the natural right; but the more sorrow a crime generates and the more it offends human needs, the more severe the punishment inflicted by society. Have you ever thought of the various consequences of a caprice of infidelity, according as a man or a woman is guilty? For man the caprice of an hour is a stain that tarnishes the bright mirror of a sworn faith, of an immaculate and sublime love; but a few moments afterward a new kiss, more ardent and pregnant with the pungent aroma of remorse, revives love perhaps more intensely and makes impossible for long years, perhaps forever, another sudden infidelity. The amorous caprice may be a blasphemy that breaks forth from the lips of a saint, but which is immediately deterged by a wave of holy prayer; it is the weakness of a robust runner who stumbles against a stone, but proudly resumes his way and with energetic steps recovers the space lost a hundredfold. The amorous caprice of a woman may in a single instant procreate a bastard, poison the wave of milk and honey of an entire family, sow a generation of fraternal hatreds, of infinite sorrows, overflow into a vast field, inundating everything with wormwood and gall. In man such a caprice is a stain, in woman a gangrene; in man a wound by a pin, in woman the caries of a bone; in man a leaf that falls, in woman a hurricane that fells a whole forest; in man a misdemeanor, in woman a felony; in man the remorse of an hour, in woman a monument of infamy that time will never efface. CHAPTER XXI THE COVENANTS OF LOVE Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after having given themselves to each other, may in a single instant have created a family, perhaps a nation. In man, love is fecundation as well, but is, above all, the interweaving of two existences, a combination of new relations, a deep modification of the manner of existence for a man and a woman.