The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the brute for which love is a desire that rises, is satisfied and falls asleep. If his affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic and intermittent love which dies every time a need is satisfied and revives with every renewed desire. The stimulus of the flesh announces in him the dawning of sentiment, and the obesity of the flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may have the same person or another as its object: this is for him a secondary and merely accidental question, and, according to the manner in which circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems this is the way in which many dark-skinned nations love, as well as many white-skinned men, who nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a necklace of Venetian beads, to which a new bead is added for every desire satisfied; and if the hues of the glass corpuscles are not too diverse, one may have before his eyes a pretty ornament that may spangle the neck of a decent virtue and an honest passion. Between the desire that dies and another that is born, you can set a gentle remembrance of gratitude for the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of a greater joy for the future; and the garland of your passion will then acquire greater beauty and new flowers and perhaps stimulate a true and great love. The most sublime heights of sentiment, the summits of thought, are reached by few; while hundreds and hundreds of lowly sheep ruminate on the plains, where thousands and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions and millions of ants are swarming. Upon the sapphire summits of the Alps two lone eagles represent the world of the living.