In the reliquary of love have found a place the beautiful and the grotesque, the horrid and the graceful. I had a friend who used to weep for long hours with joy and emotion, kissing and contemplating a thread of silk which _she_ had held in her hands, and which was for him the only relic of love. Another kept on his desk for long years the skull of his sweetheart as his dearest companion. There are those who have slept for months and years with a book, a dress, a shawl. And who can enumerate all the sublime puerilities, all the ardent tendernesses, all the insensate acts of the idolatry of love? Sensations accumulate such mysterious and deep energies in the brain of man, that, at a sign from us, they can all spring up and erect an edifice before us, greater and more beautiful than the reality of things. No woman was ever as beautiful as the image which her lover sees in the calm of his solitary adoration, or pictures upon the black ground of a night of dreams, a comparison which would often be dangerous, if the magic brush of imagination did not also overcolor the beauty of the things seen by the eye and caressed by the hand; but it is a comparison, however, which often sows the lives of artists and poets with sorrow, delusions and even crimes. If every beautiful woman could know all the kisses, all the caresses, all the hymns offered to her by the multitude of men who admire and desire her, she would certainly feel proud that she possessed the power of calling forth so many energies from the world of the living. Who knows where all those rays end, where the heat of so many motions accumulates, where such a scattered force gathers again? If it is true that nothing is lost of all that is generated, what transformation takes place in so many ardent desires that extend in the infinite void of space? Modesty imposes a great sobriety of behavior on woman, often a tyrannical reserve. She conceals from our eyes the most intimate adorations, the revels of the heart and the strange hysterics of sentiment. We, always less enamored than she, give vent more freely to our effervescence; and if a beautiful and fortunate woman should describe the scenes which she has witnessed in her youth, she would present a collection of caricatures before which all others would grow dim and mawkish; a collection which would combine the grotesque with the sublime, folly with passion, impudent threats of death and impossible fasts; sudden abandonments of one's dignity, abdications of common sense, stupid sacrifices of one's own personality, orgies of fancy and hurricanes of the senses, humiliations worthy of a Franciscan friar and braggart rodomontades. How much misery, how many carnivals and bacchanalia, and how much baseness has woman to witness! Fortunately for us, she is merciful and modest; for our honor's sake, she covers us with a corner of her queenly mantle, hiding our puerilities from the eyes of the profane, and often from our own. CHAPTER X