"That is woman as we have made her; such are your mistresses. But you say they are women and there is something good in them!
"But if your character is formed, if you are truly a man, sure of yourself and confident of your strength, you may taste of life without fear and without reserve; you may be sad or joyous, deceived or respected; but be sure you are loved, for what matters the rest?
"If you are mediocre and ordinary, I advise you to consider your course very carefully before deciding, but do not expect too much of your mistress.
"If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers. The sap of your life will dissipate into the formation of a useless bark; all your actions will be as colorless as the leaves of the willow; you will have no tears to water you, but those from your own eyes, to nourish you, no heart but your own.
"But if you are of exalted nature, believing in dreams and wishing to realize them, I say to you plainly. Love does not exist.
"For to love is to give body and soul, or, better, it is to make a single being of two; it is to walk in the sunlight, in the open air through the boundless prairies with a body having four arms, two heads and two hearts. Love is faith, it is the religion of earthly happiness, it is a luminous triangle suspended in the temple of the world. To love is to walk freely through that temple and to have at your side a being capable of understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and raise your eyes to that celestial triangle. To exercise the noble faculties of man is a great good, and that is why genius is glorious; but to double those faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a heart and an intelligence—that is supreme happiness. God has nothing better for man; that is why love is better than genius. But tell me, is that the love of our women? No, no, it must be admitted. Love, for them, is another thing; it is to go out veiled, to write in secret, to make trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs under a starched and unnatural robe, then to draw bolts and throw it aside, to humiliate a rival, to deceive a husband, to render a lover desolate; to love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play at hide and seek, the hideous debauchee of a heart, worse than all the lubricity of the Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; bastard parody of vice itself as well as of virtue; loathsome comedy where all is whispering and oblique glances, where all is small, elegant and deformed like the porcelain monsters brought from China; lamentable derision of all that is beautiful and ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body, a skeleton of all that God has made."
Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall.
CHAPTER VI
THE next morning I rode through the Bois de Boulogne; the day was dark and threatening. At the Porte Maillot I dropped the reins on the back of my horse and abandoned myself to reverie, revolving in my mind the words spoken by Desgenais the evening before.
Suddenly I heard my name called. Turning my head I spied one of my mistress's most intimate friends in an open carriage. She called to me to stop, and, holding out her hand with a friendly air, invited me to dine with her if I had no other engagement.