To continue.—The Don Juans must find great difficulty in agreeing with what I was saying just now of this state of the soul. Besides the fact that they can neither see nor feel this state, it gives too great a blow to their vanity. The error of their life is expecting to win in a fortnight what a timid lover can scarcely obtain in six months. They base their reckoning on experience got at the expense of those poor devils, who have neither the soul to please a woman of feeling by revealing its ingenuous workings, nor the necessary wit for the part of a Don Juan. They refuse to see that the same prize, though granted by the same woman, is not the same thing.
L'homme prudent sans cesse se méfie.
C'est pour cela que des amants trompeurs
Le nombre est grand. Les dames que l'on prie
Font soupirer longtemps des serviteurs
Qui n'ont jamais été faux de leur vie.
Mais du trésor qu'elles donnent enfin
Le prix n'est su que du cœur qui le goûte;
Plus on l'achète et plus il est divin:
Le los d'amour ne vaut pas ce qu'il coûte.[12]
(Nivernais, Le Troubadour Guillaume de la Tour, III, 342.)
Passion-love in the eyes of a Don Juan may be compared to a strange road, steep and toilsome, that begins, 'tis true, amidst delicious copses, but is soon lost among sheer rocks, whose aspect is anything but inviting to the eyes of the vulgar. Little by little the road penetrates into the mountain-heights, in the midst of a dark forest, where the huge trees, intercepting the daylight with their shaggy tops that seem to touch the sky, throw a kind of horror into souls untempered by dangers.
After wandering with difficulty, as in an endless maze, whose multiple turnings try the patience of our self-love, on a sudden we turn a corner and find ourselves in a new world, in the delicious valley of Cashmire of Lalla Rookh. How can the Don Juans, who never venture along this road, or at most take but a few steps along it, judge of the views that it offers at the end of the journey?...
So you see inconstancy is good:
"Il me faut du nouveau, n'en fût-il plus au monde."[13]
Very well, I reply, you make light of oaths and justice, and what can you look for in inconstancy? Pleasure apparently.
But the pleasure to be got from a pretty woman, desired a fortnight and loved three months, is different from the pleasure to be found in a mistress, desired three years and loved ten.