Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to
look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the
converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be
enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general
lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be
proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he,
for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased
to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a
nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of
Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so
dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.
In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his
sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural
union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his
love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him
talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul;
words being the colors. There is a twofold love,--love of the feeling
and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the
enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the
microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it
beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects
change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues
to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are
always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and
promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary,
enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part
female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace
and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other
only blesses for the sake of loving.
Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling.
Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of
Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most
excited mood, merely because he could not--since the flood out-thunders
everything--have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on
account of the sublime uproar.
His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into
distinct chapters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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