FATAL LOVE 143
sacrifice, remaining a widow in marriage and consoling her misery as a woman in her maternal devotion.
Hen birds never desert their nests before the fledglings can fly, and why should women be inferior to the birds as mothers?
Love as an absolute ideal defies human generation in a certain respect, and this ideal demands the unity of love. The lovely dream of Christianity is the reality of noble souls, and it is because they would not sully themselves in the promiscuity of the ancient world that so many loving hearts entered the cloisters to live and die in an eternal desire. This occasionally sublime error is always regrettable. Ought one to refuse to live because one is not immortal? Ought one to stop eating because the food for the soul is better than that for the body? Ought one to give up walking for lack of wings?
Happy the noble Hidalgo, Don Quixote, who imagines hc pays homage to Dulcinea when kissing the big, ill-shod feet of a peasant girl from Toboso!
Rousseau’s Heloise, which we have just been criticizing so severely from the point of view of the absolute in love, is for all that a delightful creation, which is the more true for being defective, and reproduces in a truly human novel all the contradictions and weaknesses which made Rousseau a combination of the Don Quixote of virtue and a gossipy old retainer. After failing with Mrs de Warens, of whom he thought himself jealous. after losing his head over Mrs de Larnage, after adoring Mrs de Houdetot, who loved another, he philosophically married his housekeeper, and if it is true that the poor man died of a broken heart on discovering that Theresa had been unfaithful to him, one must admire and pity him, his heart was made for love’
There is only one woman in the world for the heart which is worthy of love, but the woman, this earthly divinity, sometimes reveals herself in several persons, and her incarnations are often more numerous than the avatars of Vishnu. Happy are those believers who never lose hope and, in the winter of the heart, await the return of the swallows.
The sun glows inside a drop of water. It is a diamond, a world. Blessed in the man who, when the drop of water evaporates, does not think that the sun has gone away. Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal Beauty. the unique object of
Copyrighted material