Voluptuousness, even in its purest and simplest forms, without love is always lasciviousness; it is immoral even when it seems hygienic. With love, even lust is virtue; and the studied casuistry of theologians is more immodest than the most ardent kiss ever exchanged between two lovers educated by a long experience of embraces. Voluptuousness is as penetrating as light, as inexhaustible as the sun, and, enclosed between two infinities, one of desire and the other of languor, it will never be all known by the human family, were it to live for millions of centuries. All forms of the beautiful are conquered by the blandishments of art; all forms of virtue are the delight of the sentiment of the good; every great and true idea is the joy of our thought; but voluptuousness relishes simultaneously all the joys of the senses, of sentiment and of intellect, calms all morbosities, extinguishes all fires, intoxicates itself with all inebriations, high and low, with all languors, all human flashes. Voluptuousness is a light which gilds every object it strikes and encircles it with a halo of celestial iridescence. Nor is the embrace of love alone voluptuous; for voluptuousness is in every contact of quivering robes, of glossy hair; voluptuousness is in every quiver of the skin, in every shock of the nerves, in every kiss of the flesh. Unfortunate he who has tasted voluptuousness only out of the one cup of Venus! Let him take lessons of woman, wisest teacher of every exquisite and sublime sensuality. A Boeotian in art, let him go to Athens and study the beautiful. There is no worse enemy of voluptuousness than lust, no sister more faithful than chastity. If the poet, the painter, the sculptor could conceive this divine group, "the joy of Love guided by the hand of Chastity," that representation, whether due to pen, brush or chisel, would be as holy a thing as an altar, a lesson in virtue and a great work of art; fire enclosed in alabaster, the sun abducted by the wave, enamored and jealous; Hercules led by a child! Lovers who love and possess each other, lovers whom voluptuousness inebriates every hour, if you still have an instant to devote to prudence, remember that voluptuousness should not be the bread but the wine of love; that if you wish that your lips be eternally thirsty, your voluptuousness must be chaste and modest; you must swim, but not drown; you must quiver, but not fall into convulsions; you must be in the grasp of death, but not dead. Modest voluptuousness, this priceless treasure, was given by nature to woman, that she may restore it to you with unbounded joys; and you should respect it as a palladium of domestic happiness and nurture it in your daughters, because verily I say unto you that in modern society there is often more pudicity in the lowest of courtesans than in some married women whose nuptial education has been imparted by an aged and libertine husband. CHAPTER VII HOW LOVE IS PRESERVED AND HOW IT DIES