Most animals that pair, taste pleasure only by a single sense, and as
soon as the appetite is satisfied, everything is extinguished. No
animal, apart from you, knows what kissing is; the whole of your body is
sensitive; your lips especially enjoy a voluptuousness that nothing can
tire; and this pleasure belongs to no species but yours: you can give
yourself up to love at any time, and the animals have but a fixed time.
If you reflect on these superiorities, you will say with the Count of
Rochester--"In a country of atheists love would cause the Deity to be
worshipped."
As men have received the gift of perfecting all that nature accords
them, they have perfected love. Cleanliness, the care of oneself, by
rendering the skin more delicate, increase the pleasure of contact; and
attention to one's health renders the organs of voluptuousness more
sensitive. All the other sentiments that enter into that of love, just
like metals which amalgamate with gold: friendship, regard, come to
help; the faculties of mind and body are still further chains.
Self-love above all tightens all these bonds. One applauds oneself for
one's choice, and a crowd of illusions form the decoration of the
building of which nature has laid the foundations.
That is what you have above the animals. But if you taste so many
pleasures unknown to them, how many sorrows too of which the beasts have
no idea! What is frightful for you is that over three-fourths of the
earth nature has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life
with an appalling disease to which man alone is subject, and which
infects in him the organs of generation alone.
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