“But, bless my soul,” said M. de Terremondre “how does the man distinguish between guilty love and lust?”
“It is a fine point,” said M. Bergeret. “The Fathers of the Church, the schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Descartes and Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, have all failed to make the distinction, and some of them have even confounded with the two what men to-day agree in calling innocent love. But is love ever innocent—unless it be that love Professor Bellac in Pailleron’s play described as l’amour psychique, the love that Petrarch bore to Laura?”
“If I remember aright,” interposed M. Mazure, “someone else in the play remarked that Laura had eleven children.”
Just then Mme. de Gromance passed across the Place. The conversation was suspended while all three men watched her into the patissier’s opposite, elegantly hovering over the plates of cakes, and finally settling on a baba au rhum.
“Sapristi!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, “she’s the prettiest woman in the whole place.”
M. Bergeret mentally went over several passages in Æneid, Book IV., looked ruefully at his frayed shirt cuffs, and regretted the narrow life of a provincial university lecturer that reduced him to insignificance in the eyes of the prettiest woman in the place.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh, “it is a very fine point. I wonder how on earth Tépé manages to settle it?”
THE CHOCOLATE DRAMA
Civilization is a failure. That we all knew, even before the war, and indeed ever since the world first began to suffer from the intolerable nuisance of disobedient parents. But the latest and most fatal sign of decadence is the advent of a paradoxical Lord Chancellor. I read in a Times leader:—“When the Lord Chancellor ponderously observes in the House of Lords that the primary business of theatres ‘is not to sell chocolates but to present the drama,’ he is making a statement which is too absurd to analyse.” The Times, I rejoice to see, is living up to its high traditions of intrepid and incisive utterance. I should not myself complain if the Lord Chancellor was merely ponderous. As the dying Heine observed, when someone wondered if Providence would pardon him, c’est son métier. What is so flagrant is the Lord Chancellor’s ignorance of the commanding position acquired by chocolate in relation to the modern drama.