its only source in voluptuousness and beauty; one has vanished, the other one is withered and the strength is spent. No force in the world is produced without the transmutation of matter; no energy is increased without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinities. If man and woman do not revive an affinity of sympathy, no combination can take place; no light, no heat can spring forth from their contact. Let them sing the psalms of death and together bury the remains of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, was inexorably to perish with it. This is the most general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their life can be calculated with fair precision by weighing the beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. Those loves may last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they may, in rare cases, last for the entire period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the blows of time, and with incredible art repair the ravages of age; and not only are forms daily adulterated, denatured and counterfeited, but into the cup of love, as well, spices and drugs and philters are poured, that the silent hunger may receive the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and soft blandishments and morbid temptations of the flesh substitute the ardor and impetus of passion. Long lasts the battle before defeat is acknowledged and love changes its nature but still lives. It was a volcano, it is now a Bengal light; it was as nude and chaste as an Uranian Venus, it is now as clothed and immodest as a courtesan; it was love of every hour, it is now periodical, intermittent, like the tertian or the quartan; it impunely defied the rays of the sun at midday, it now prefers the twilight; but, when all is said, in spite of so much reticence and so much tinkering, it is still and always love. Women, you who behold with horror the gradual extinction of that fire which for so many years has warmed your enamored members, if you were happy through beauty alone, remember that that fire will be extinguished with the withering of the last attraction of your body; and when the heartrending cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire will not be answered, prepare for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire in the flaccid flesh of your lover, love will not be dead. You see, then, to what a low level the art of preserving love has sunk, when love has its origin only in the desire of bodily form: it sinks to a question of hygiene; I would nearly say, it transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy and preservation by chemical process! It is necessary to study the antiseptic virtue of deliberate refusals and libertine reticence; to submit lust to a chemical research and fatigue to a physiological investigation; to meditate upon the economy of energies and visit the pharmacy for the purpose of discovering the