And why, my boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, my pretty girl, do you allow yourself to be kissed only by the lips of that dark, impertinent little beau? Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark lad is unlike any other boy. Love, from its first and most indistinct appearance, is selection, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition of discomposed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of dissociated things; the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most prepotent of the affinities ties of attraction! Aside from the precursory crepuscules of natures most powerful in love, this sentiment, in ordinary men, rises when a new want springs forth under the rod of that magical transformer which is puberty. At that time, on the smooth, pubescent, roundish surface of the infantile nature, a deep crevice opens; a void is formed which woman alone can fill; then, that little, round, smooth fruit called _little girl_ also sheds its childish skin, disclosing the juicy and delicate flesh of the fruit which was hidden in it. Then, from every developed muscle of the virile organism, from every sound of its strengthened voice, from every hair that makes its skin hirsute, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the loudest tone: _A woman!_ And from every flexuous limb of the girl who has become a woman, from every quiver of the hair which makes her proud, from every pore of the young girl who has become a crater of burning desires, arises a cry which demands: _A man!_ The passage of the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is one of the epochs most burdened with anxieties, most merry with convulsive joys, and for this I call it the _hysterical period of life_. I shall illustrate it, perhaps, some day, in a work which I am preparing on the ages of man. I shall here describe with few, wide strokes of the pen how the necessity of loving makes itself felt to most men. And if I have referred to woman most of the time, it is because she, more chaste, more reserved, and yet a hundred times more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the appearance of the new god; more innocent than we are, she does not know his nature; more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature conceded to man common resources almost unknown to woman, and only too often precocious vice makes him acquainted sooner with voluptuousness than with love. When he is chaste, virtuous and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult, which stirs his soul; he too, somber, melancholy, frantic, demands of nature, with the accents of wrath and plaintive lamentations: _A woman!_