Marriage may be considered in three ways, politically, as well as from a civil and moral point of view:  as a law, as a contract and as an institution.  As a law, its object is a reproduction of the species; as a contract, it relates to the transmission of property; as an institution, it is a guarantee which all men give and by which all are bound:  they have father and mother, and they will have children.  Marriage, therefore, ought to be the object of universal respect.  Society can only take into consideration those cardinal points, which, from a social point of view, dominate the conjugal question.

Most men have no other views in marrying, than reproduction, property or children; but neither reproduction nor property nor children constitutes happiness.  The command, “Increase and multiply,” does not imply love.  To ask of a young girl whom we have seen fourteen times in fifteen days, to give you love in the name of law, the king and justice, is an absurdity worthy of the majority of the predestined.

Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment; happiness in marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair.  Hence it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by certain rules of honor and delicacy.  After having enjoyed the benefit of the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves.  If he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love sincerely:  nothing can resist a genuine passion.

But to feel this passion is always to feel desire.  Can a man always desire his wife?

Yes.

It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a charming melody.

Love is the poetry of the senses.  It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought.  Either it is sublime, or it is not.  When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing.  This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.

Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this investigation for the next century to carry out.

If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression, pleasure should be even more diversified.  For in the three arts which aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy, the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of two bodies and of two souls.  If the three principal methods upon which we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those whom nature has made poets, musicians