To love is to walk freely through that temple, at your side a being capable of understanding why a thought, a word, a flower makes you pause and raise your eyes to that celestial triangle.

To exercise the noble faculties of man is a great good--that is why genius is glorious; but to double those faculties, to place a heart and an intelligence upon a heart and an intelligence--that is supreme happiness.

God has nothing better for man; that is why love is better than genius.
"But tell me, is that the love of our women?
No, no, it must be admitted.

Love, for them, is another thing; it is to go out veiled, to write in secret, to make trembling advances, to heave chaste sighs under starched and unnatural robes, then to draw bolts and throw them aside, to humiliate a rival, to deceive a husband, to render a lover desolate.
To love, for our women, is to play at lying, as children play at hide and seek, a hideous orgy of the heart, worse than the lubricity of the Romans, or the Saturnalia of Priapus; a bastard parody of vice itself, as well as of virtue; a loathsome comedy where all is whispering and sidelong glances, where all is small, elegant, and deformed, like those porcelain monsters brought from China; a lamentable satire on all that is beautiful and ugly, divine and infernal; a shadow without a body, a skeleton of all that God has made." Thus spoke Desgenais; and the shadows of night began to fall..