us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'
'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But——'
'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'
'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'
'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'
'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'
'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'
'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'
'"La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre meublée, or at most for the saison aux eaux.'
'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice. 'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'
'That is only because all human life is a game of cross purposes; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse the gods or make them weep.'
'That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory analysis. Besides, the world has been wondering about that ever since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer to its queries.'
'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the Prince de Ligne's "Dans l'amour il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants." In the middle of the romance I see you all yawn, at the end you usually quarrel. Some wise man—I forget who—has said that it requires much more talent and much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably than to begin it.'
'Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is easy to be so.'
'Admit also that there are very few characters which will stand the test of intimacy; very few minds of sufficient charm and originality to be able to bear the strain of long and familiar intercourse.'
'What has the mind to do with it?'
'That question is flippant and even coarse. The mind has something to do with it, even in animals; or why should the lion prefer one lioness to another? When d'Aubiac went to the gallows kissing a tiny velvet muff of Margaret de Valois, or when young Calixte de Montmorin knelt on the scaffold pressing to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon which had belonged to Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the senses.'
'It was a sentiment.'
'A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all fear of death or personal regret. The muff, the ribbon, were symbols of an imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles, like Psyche's butterfly, were representative of an immortal element in mortal life and mortal feeling.'
'M. de Béthune would go to the scaffold like that himself,' said the sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indulgent derision.
'And our lady,' hinted the Duc de Béthune, 'forgets her own rule, that all personalities are forbidden.'
'It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have not also the power to transgress them. Well, if immortality is to enter into love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded every day, but every day one is liable to be bored. J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit. Every intellectual person must exact that. To worship my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue my patience and my ear. The majority of people divorce love and wit. They are very wrong. It is only wit which can tell love when he has gone too far, or is losing ground, has repeated himself ad nauseam, or requires absence to restore his charm.'
'Ah, Majesté! by the time he has become such a philosopher has he not ceased to be love at all?'
'Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court expressly for the truth it contains. Why does most love end so drearily in a sudden death by quarrelling or in a lingering death by tedium? Because it has had no wit, no judgment, no reserve, no skill. By way of showing itself to be eternal, it has hammered itself into pieces on the rock of repetition. Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit! What a world of endured ennui sighs forth in that appeal!'
'No woman upon earth has had so much love given her as the châtelaine of Amyôt, and no woman on earth ever viewed love with such unkind and airy contempt.'
She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusation.
'She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks down on the weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by them,' said the Duc de Béthune.
She replied again, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.'
'It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon amusement than upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what may have the good fortune to be considered "esprit" by her? I fear she finds us all very dull to-day.'
'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.'
'Your heaviest word of censure!'
'To return to our theme: do you not punish inconstancy?'
'Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second, if any one be so stupid that he or she cannot keep the affections they have once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim no pity.'
'Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited fate?'
'Unmerited—no. They have not known how to keep what they had got. Probably they have worried it till it escaped in desperation, as a child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes itself through the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself on the road to the certainty of being strangled in prison.'
'Who would not prefer it?'
'The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales of proportion are weighted unevenly: there
