'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 is generally one lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great nature; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice; say it is a profound temperament and a shallow one; in some way or other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When they are quite even—which happens once out of a million times—then there is a great and felicitous love; an exquisite and imperishable sympathy.'
'But who holds these magical scales? It is the holder who is responsible.'
'The holder is Fate.'
'Chance.'
'Opportunity.'
'Destiny.'
'Predestination.'
'Circumstance.'
'Affinity.'
'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect love is the result.'
'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an earthly paradise.'
'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'
'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'
'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'
'Nay, Majesté; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'
'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'
'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'
'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's conscience.'
'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'
'Whoever loves most loves longest.'
'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'
'How is that to be explained?'
'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain everything.'
'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'
'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'
'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'
'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.'
'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than Dante?'
'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed—the difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'
'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown old and grey, passes out limping,