Anything is good and enough for a first love, which is nearly always a million of hunger and a penny of bread. How vulgar is the object of that enamored young girl's thoughts! The heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and the hebetude of his stare seems sentimental languor to her; he is ill, and to her his illness appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant, but to her he is passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will love but her, who alone will know how to make him happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has launched to the skies, when he sang the exciting form of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he not wept, thinking of the bluish paleness of a cholerotic working-woman! Woe, if seduction accompanies all this texture of lies with which too often the first love builds its nest! Woe, if to the inexperienced maiden the aged libertine says, with the accent acquired from long practice: "I love you!" Woe, if the lascivious old woman, satisfying her old appetite with unripe fruit, knows how to warm the innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is kindled, the flames spread, and the first object loved is placed on the altar with vows of eternal fealty, and perfumed with the incense of the maddest, most unrestrained idolatry. The first love is not always born so evilly, but it too closely resembles, alas! these first loves which I have just described. Let us be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the wood-worm that in modern society cuts into and corrodes the highest and strongest tree in the garden of life. The original sin of love appears to us with its first cry, and even when we have been forced to use all the artifices of the galvanoplastic to gild our idol, even when the bellows of imagination have worked to inflame the first love, the very first thing we say is a lie: "I love you above everything in this world; I shall love you forever. You are my first love, and one can love but once." And a second vow answers the first, perhaps more sacred and more ardent; and in a kiss, that is often the sum of two lies, the first hypocrisy is sealed, which down to the last generation of the loves of those two beings will seal with an everlasting mark all the expressions of affection, all the cravings of the heart.