The need for such a great and true love remains fixed, notwithstanding all deceptions, bitternesses, and the sorrows of unsatisfied longing. Love is, in fact, the human being himself; like the human being, love has its development, its impulse towards higher things, towards that which is better. No painful experience can completely annihilate love, and the need for love. In a beautiful stanza a French poet of the eighteenth century, the Chevalier de Bonnard, has described this essential permanency of love: “Hélas! pourquoi le souvenir De ces erreurs de mon aurore Me fait-il pousser un soupir! Je dois peut-être aimer encore, Ah! si j’aime encore, je sens bien Que je serai toujours le même; Le temps au cœur ne change rien: Eh! n’est-ce pas ainsi qu’on aime?” True love is the product of the ripest development; it is therefore rare, and comes late. For this reason, as Nietzsche points out, the time for marriage comes much earlier than the time for love. It is by means of spiritual relationships that love first becomes enduring. Its prolongation is almost always effected only by an enlargement and variation of psychical relationships. Physical relationships alone soon lose through habituation the stimulus of novelty; whence we explain the fact that so many husbands, notwithstanding the physical beauty of their wives, become unfaithful to them, often in favour of much uglier women, of girls of the lower classes, or even of prostitutes. The de Goncourts remark in their “Diary” that the beauty which in a _cocotte_ a man will reward with 100,000 francs, will not in his own wife seem worth 10,000 francs--in the wife whom he has married, and who, with her dowry, has brought him this magnificent beauty into the bargain. For this reason, a priest, when a wife complained to him that her husband had begun to get somewhat cold in his manner to her, gave the following by no means bad advice: “My dear child, the most honourable wife must have in her just a suspicion of the demi-mondaine.” The greatest danger for love, a danger which therefore makes its appearance above all in married life, is the danger of =habituation=. This has a double effect. On the one hand, by the mere monotony of eternal repetition, love may become blunted. “It is worth remarking,” says Goethe, “that custom is capable of completely replacing passionate love; it demands not so much a charming, as a comfortable object; given that, it is invincible.”