Let him call my mistress a prude: I shall call his a whore.
[1] I have called this essay a book of Ideology. My object was to indicate that, though it is called "Love," it is not a novel and still less diverting like a novel. I apologise to philosophers for having taken the word Ideology: I certainly did not intend to usurp a title which is the right of another. If Ideology is a detailed description of ideas and all the parts which can compose ideas, the present book is a detailed description of all the feelings which can compose the passion called Love. Proceeding, I draw certain consequences from this description: for example, the manner of love's cure. I know no word to say in Greek "discourse on ideas." I might have had a word invented by one of my learned friends, but I am already vexed enough at having to adopt the new word crystallisation, and, if this essay finds readers, it is quite possible that they will not allow my new word to pass. To avoid it, I own, would have been the work of literary talent: I tried, but without success. Without this word, which expresses, according to me, the principal phenomenon of that madness called Love—madness, however, which procures for man the greatest pleasures which it is given to the beings of his species to taste on earth—without the use of this word, which it were necessary to replace at every step by a paraphrase of considerable length, the description, which I give of what passes in the head and the heart of a man in love, would have become obscure, heavy and tedious, even for me who am the author: what would it have been for the reader?
I invite, therefore, the reader, whose feelings the word crystallisation shocks too much, to close the book. To be read by many forms no part of my prayers—happily, no doubt, for me. I should love dearly to give great pleasure to thirty or forty people of Paris, whom I shall never see, but for whom, without knowing, I have a blind affection. Some young Madame Roland, for example, reading her book in secret and precious quickly hiding it, at the least noise, in the drawers of her father's bench—her father the engraver of watches. A soul like that of Madame Roland will forgive me, I hope, not only the word crystallisation, used to express that act of madness which makes us perceive every beauty, every kind of perfection, in the woman whom we begin to love, but also several too daring ellipses besides. The reader has only to take a pencil and write between the lines the five or six words which are missing.
[2] All his actions had at first in my eyes that heavenly air, which makes of a man a being apart, and differentiates him from all others. I thought that I could read in his eyes that thirst for a happiness more sublime, that unavowed melancholy, which yearns for something better than we find here below, and which in all the trials that fortune and revolution can bring upon a romantic soul,
... still prompts the celestial sight
For which we wish to live or dare to die.
(Last letter of Bianca to her mother. Forlì, 1817.)
[3] It is in order to abridge and to be able to paint the interior of the soul, that the author, using the formula of the first person, alleges several feelings to which he is a stranger: personally, he never had any which would be worth quoting.