Chapter I: REMEMBER to have seen a man forsaking the society of ballet girls

because, so he said, he had found them as deceitful as honest women.

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SOMEONE remarked of a lady who was not venal, followed her heart’s promptings, and remained faithful to the object of her choice, “She is a charming woman and lives as virtuously as is possible outside marriage and celibacy.”

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WOMEN only give to friendship what they borrow from love.

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LOVE as it exists in society is nothing more than the exchange of two fancies and the contact of two epidermes.

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DUCLOS was speaking one day of the paradise that everyone imagines for himself in his own way. “Here are the ingredients for yours, Duclos,” said Madame de Rochefort; “Wine, bread, and cheese, and the first woman who might come on the scene.”

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APPARENTLY love does not seek real perfections--one might say it fears them. It only loves those which it creates or supposes, and so resembles those monarchs who only recognise the great things they themselves have achieved.

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A MAN in love who pities the reasonable man seems to me like one who reads fairy tales and jeers at those who read history.

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LOVE resembles epidemic diseases: the more one fears them, the more liable is one to infection.

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IN witnessing or experiencing the pains inseparable from intense feeling in love and friendship, be it by the death of the loved person or by the accidents of life, one is tempted to believe that dissipation and frivolity are not such great follies after all, and that life is scarce worth more than what fashionable folk make of it.

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MARRIAGE follows on love as smoke on flame.

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LOVE gives greater pleasure than marriage for the same reason that romances are more amusing than history.

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ONE of the best reasons you can have for never marrying is not so much that you are the woman’s dupe as that she is not yours.

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BOTH marriage and celibacy have their respective drawbacks: we shall be wise if we make choice of that which is not irremediable.

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FOR thirty years a certain man went to spend every evening with Mme. ----. When his wife died his friends believed he would marry the other, and urged him to do so. “No, no,” he said, “if I did, where should I have to spend my evenings?”

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