If genital chastity is the virtue which, better than any other, preserves vulgar loves, a certain chastity of sentiment and thought, a certain reserve of manner and forms are also indispensable if sublime loves are to last. The man must never see his wife nude, nor should the woman ever behold her companion nude before her; veils and mists, leaves and flowers must shade the man and woman in sense, sentiment and intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never tires of loving, contemplating, studying, just because it is neither weighed nor measured. And so it is in love: the beautiful, the true, the good of the creature whom we love must be infinite, because they must not be seen, weighed or measured by us. A sun that passes from the crepuscule of the morning to the evening twilight and never entirely reveals itself: such is eternal and immutable love, that fears no frost of winter or hurricanes of summer; that dies standing like the ancient heroes. Study the fortunate men who are not only capable of arousing, but also of preserving great passions, and you will behold in them all those exalted virtues which may be grouped under the name of _crepuscular politics_. A beauty that has more grace than splendor, more seduction than heat; a flexibility that retains strength; an authority that can be made to smile, and a nature that is smiling rather than laughing; a deep and tender kindness, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur: such are the great preservative powers of love. Grace more than beauty preserves love, because it has more crepuscular hues; sympathetic natures more than beautiful ones preserve love, kind natures more than grand ones, wit more than genius. There are men and women who at first sight do not make any great impression, but on every hair of their head they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a leech, so that no sooner have you come into intimate contact with them than you find yourself seized by a thousand grapnels and absorbed by a thousand cupping-glasses, as though a gigantic polyp had seized you in the absorbing coils of its manifold tentacles. Love is dead without possibility of resurrection when, unlike all living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the slumbering nerves, no wave of blood to rouse the heart. But love also has swoons and syncopes and, like the rotifer, may die provisorily and desiccate, awaiting a beneficial rain to restore it to life. Whoever denies this virtue in love, then believes that love is baser than the rotifer and has never known the most elementary physiology of life and affection. There is for love, as for any other organism, a real death and an apparent one; the former is inexorable, the latter curable, like any other malady, by having recourse to skill and knowledge.