Loves of mixed origin are the purer and warmer, the larger the part played in them by sympathy, and this element alone would suffice to allot a place to them in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and so prepotent that more than once affections suffering from a dangerous illness recovered suddenly at the tender remembrance of these thoughts: "You really loved me one day of your life." "You are mine by love and nothing else." "And yet I loved you!" Often a man born in the highest place and of noblest blood sinks gradually into the mire, loses his dignity, his fortune, even the most superficial appearance of manners and behavior; yet if you observe him attentively you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the majestic tone of his voice, in some refined taste, such traces of his ancient origin as may have survived the shipwreck. And so it happens with a well-born love. I have seen passions dragged in the mire of abjection, tattered and foul, like a velvet rag picked up in the gutter; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and infamy; but in those poor shreds I have always found something that had remained intact and revealed its ancient and noble origin; and with my own eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections that seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of the divine intervention and of the galley-slaves too arcadically rehabilitated through the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.