"The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the theatre, Procopius adds: [Greek: anapeptôkuia]. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of nature, wishing a _fourth altar_, on which she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his wife and called her _a gift of the Deity_." (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.") "The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by the spirit of many young women." (Bible.) These few examples will be sufficient to delineate in a general way the frontiers within which human voluptuousness struggles, an insatiable author of so much good and so much evil. And yet, in the eyes of science it is nothing but "the most powerful of chemical affinities comprehended by the most perfect of living brains." Prepared in the slow laboratory of a man and a woman, the gemmulæ of life intensely seek each other and are reciprocally attracted; and when love gathers them by millions and millions, they kiss and join and, quivering, restore one of the most prodigious equilibriums of nature and generate a man. If it is true that at every second a leaf detaches itself and falls from the human tree, it is most true that in the same unit of time ten existences at least are fused in order to relight the torch of life; and if all the gigantic forces which are condensed in those aggregations could be summed up, they would certainly be sufficient to send the world through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, on the soft cushions of new-mown hay and on the glaciers of the Sorata; on the swift train and on two camels crossing the desert, within the damp walls of the prison and in the deep mines where the rays of the sun never penetrate, in the forest and on the sands of the sea-shore, wherever a man and a woman find themselves near and can desire each other, voluptuousness wreathes its garlands and says to the man and the woman: "Be gods for an instant!" There is no love without voluptuousness, but voluptuousness alone is not love, as that is not love which is ridiculously termed platonic. Lust and platonic love are maladies or monsters of love and are possible, nay, even too prevalent, like the deaf-mutes, the lame, the deformed, the giants and the dwarfs.