The heroes who,
during their lifetime, shone in the chariot races, drove imaginary
chariots when they were dead. Heloise lived with you on illusions and
supplements. She kissed you sometimes, and with all the more pleasure
that having taken a vow at the Paraclet monastery to love you no longer,
her kisses thereby became more precious as more guilty. A woman can
barely be seized with a passion for a eunuch: but she can keep her
passion for her lover become eunuch, provided that he remains lovable.
It is not the same, ladies, for a lover who has grown old in service;
the externals subsist no longer; the wrinkles horrify; the white
eyebrows shock; the lost teeth disgust; the infirmities estrange: all
that one can do is to have the virtue of being nurse, and of tolerating
what one has loved. It is burying a dead man.
_LUXURY_
People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse
and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.
What has not been said of the early Romans when these brigands ravaged
and pillaged the harvests; when, to enlarge their poor village, they
destroyed the poor villages of the Volscians and the Samnites? They were
disinterested, virtuous men; they had not yet been able to steal either
gold, silver, or precious stones, because there were not any in the
little towns they plundered. Their woods and their marshes produced
neither pheasants nor partridges, and people praise their temperance.
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