Man, who daily accuses of vanity his female companion, shows oftener than the latter the most grotesque and clownish forms of that sentiment; and we rarely see him renounce the puerile ostentation of those of his loves which had the bastardly origin of vanity. How often has he reached the lowest stage of cowardice by casting up to the woman who blessed him with love, that he sought her love only to adorn with another trophy his triumphal chariot! Woman, instead, almost always, even when she has desired to be loved out of vanity alone, even when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, will give him a testimonial which makes him happy, does not humiliate him, and will satisfy him that he pleased--for a day, a month, a year--the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him very blandly. No man feels humiliated in thinking that he was the sweet victim of a caprice; all feel dejected if made the target of a vainglorious speculation. And many other times, woman, with a very refined and generous tact, pretends not to understand that she is desired and loved solely out of vanity, and gradually succeeds in making men love her for herself, and for herself alone. The _friendly enemy_ not perceiving it, she succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and warm passion for the narrow ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that woman is superior to us in sentiment in the same degree as we are superior to her in mental strength; one of the thousand proofs that woman always endeavors to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often want to force under the Caudine Forks of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagles, were born on the highest rocks of psychology. Lust is the prolific mother of most vulgar loves; nay, this sentiment is to many only the necessity of drinking at a spring found to be sweeter than any other. Nude love, without the splendid garments of imagination and heart, stripped even of the robust flesh lent to it by the sentiment of the beautiful, is reduced to a skeleton which is lust and which for very many is all they think of love. What a poor, wretched thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a cup which we prefer to any other because we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst out of it. To have possessed before having loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love! What ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that, at times, it can perform the prodigy of being born of lechery.