THE EQUINOX
become a father in order that he may have more children to
devour. To conquer love is to triumph over the whole of
Nature. To submit it to justice is to rehabilitate life by
devoting it to immortality; thus the greatest works of the
Christian revelation are the creation of voluntary virginity
and the sanctification of marriage.
While love is nothing but a desire and an enjoyment, it is
mortal. In order to make itself eternal it must become a
sacrifice, for then it becomes a power and a virtue. It is the
struggle of Eros and Anteros which produces the equilibrium
of the world.
Everything that over-excites sensibility leads to depravity
and crime. Tears call for blood. It is with great emotions
as with strong drink; to use them habitually is to abuse
them. Now, every abuse of the emotions perverts the moral
sense; one seeks them for their own sakes; one sacrifices
everything in order to procure them for one’s self. A
romantic woman will easily become an Old Bailey heroine.
She may even arrive at the deplorable and irreparable
absurdity of killing herself in order to admire herself, and
pity herself, in seeing herself die!
Romantic habits lead women to hysteria and men to
melancholia. Manfred, René, Lélia are types of perversity
only the more profound in that they argue on behalf of their
unhealthy pride, and make poems of their dementia. One
asks one’s self with terror what monster might be born
from the coupling of Manfred and Lélia!
The loss of the moral sense is a true insanity; the man
who does not, first of all, obey justice no longer belongs to
himself; he walks without a light in the night of his exist-
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