ThiS work has had no success: it has been found unintelligible—not without reason. Therefore in this new edition the author's primary intention has been to render his ideas with clearness. He has related how they came to him, and he has made a preface and an introduction—all in order to be clear. Yet, in spite of so much care, out of a hundred who have read Corinne, there are not four readers who will understand this volume.

Although it deals with Love, this little book is no novel, and still less is it diverting like a novel. 'Tis simply and solely an exact scientific description of a kind of madness which is very rarely to be found in France. The Empire of propriety, growing day by day wider, under the influence of our fear of ridicule much more than through the purity of our morals, has made of the word, which serves as title to this work, an expression, of which outspoken mention is avoided and which at times seems even to give offence. I have been forced to make use of it, but the scientific austerity of the language shelters me, I think, in this respect, from all reproach.

I know one or two Secretaries of Legation who will, at their return, be able to tender me their services. Till then what can I say to the people who deny the facts of my narration? Beg them not to listen to it.The form I have adopted may be reproached with egoism. A traveller is allowed to say: "I was at New York, thence I embarked for South America, I made my way back as far as Santa-FÉ-de-Bogota. The gnats and mosquitoes made my life a misery during the journey, and for three days I couldn't use my right eye."

The traveller is not accused of loving to talk of himself: all his me's and my's are forgiven; for that is the clearest and most interesting manner of telling what he has seen.

It is in order, if possible, to be clear and picturesque, that the author of the present voyage into the little-known regions of the human heart says: "I went with Mme. Gherardi to the salt mines of Hallein.... Princess Crescenzi said to me at Rome.... One day at Berlin I saw handsome Capt. L...." All these little things really happened to the author, who passed fifteen years in Germany and Italy. But more observant than sensitive, he never encountered the least adventure himself, never experienced a single personal sentiment worthy of narration. Even supposing that he had the pride to believe the contrary, a still greater pride would have prevented him from publishing his heart and selling it on the market for six francs, like those people who in their lifetime publish their memoirs.

Correcting in 1822 the proofs of this kind of moral voyage in Italy and Germany, the author, who had described the objects the day that he had seen them, treated the manuscript, containing the detailed description of all the phases of this malady of the soul called Love, with that blind respect, shown by a scholar of the fourteenth century for a newly unearthed manuscript of Lactantius or Quintius Curtius. When the author met some obscure passage (and often, to say the truth, that happened), he always believed that the fault lay with the self who was reading, not with the self who had written. He confesses that his respect for the early manuscript carried him so far as to print several passages, which he did not understand himself. Nothing more foolish for anyone who had thought of the good graces of the public; but the author, seeing Paris again after long travels, came to the conclusion that without grovelling before the Press a success was not to be had. Well, let him who brings himself to grovel keep that for the minister in power! A so-called success being out of the question, the author was pleased to publish his thoughts exactly as they had come to him. This was once upon a time the procedure of those philosophers of Greece, whose practical wisdom filled him with rapturous admiration.

It requires years to gain admittance to the inner circle of Italian society. Perhaps I shall have been the last traveller in that country. For since the Carbonari and the Austrian invasion, no foreigner will ever be received as a friend in the salons, where such reckless gaiety reigned. The traveller will see the monuments, streets and public places of a city, never the society—he will always be held in fear: the inhabitants will suspect that he is a spy, or fear that he is laughing at the battle of Antrodoco and at the degradations, which, in that land, are the one and only safeguard against the persecution of the eight or ten ministers or favourites who surround the Prince. Personally, I really loved the inhabitants and could see the truth. Sometimes for ten months together I never spoke a word of French, and but for political troubles and the Carbonari I would never have returned to France. Good-nature is what I prize above all things.

In spite of great care to be clear and lucid, I cannot perform miracles: I cannot give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. So the people of great fortunes and gross pleasures, who have made a hundred thousand francs in the year preceding the moment they open this book, had better quickly shut it, especially if they are bankers, manufacturers, respectable industrial folk—that's to say, people with eminently positive ideas. This book would be less unintelligible to anyone who had made a large sum of money on the Stock Exchange or in a lottery. Such winnings may be found side by side with the habit of passing hours together in day-dreams, in the enjoyment of the emotion evoked by a picture of Prud'hon, a phrase of Mozart, still more, a certain peculiar look of a woman who is often in your thoughts. 'Tis not in this way that these people "waste their time," who pay ten thousand workmen at the end of each week: their minds work always towards the useful and the positive. The dreamer, of whom I speak, is the man they would hate, if they had time; 'tis him they like to make the butt of their harmless jokes. The industrial millionaire feels confusedly that such a man has more estime for a thought than for a bag of money.

I invite the studious young man to withdraw, if in the same year as the industrial gained a hundred thousand francs, he has acquired the knowledge of modern Greek, and is so proud of it that already he aspires to Arabic. I beg not to open this book every man, who has not been unhappy for imaginary reasons, reasons to which vanity is stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in the salons.

I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of these very salons by an affectation that never lapses for an instant. Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of real feelings? In fact this work has been their bÊte noire: they say that the author must be a wretch.

To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibility and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of the salon, but in the eyes of a certain person in the salon; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)—or even to enter the salon where the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself—these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change in the tariff of Columbia.[2]

The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak, the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called the Passion of Love.

Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical figure, but on one condition—that it exists already on the blackboard, for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling, something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can a passion be seen?

This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula. Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as the Nouvelle HÉloÏse, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and Manon Lescaut, have been written in France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches its full height scarcely ever.

What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it described—without ever feeling it—in hundreds of celebrated volumes, what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness? I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness."

Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase behind the other books—I should even leave a few pages uncut.

'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily, those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet to possess enough penetration to judge a priori of the degree of exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered description of these weaknesses.

The grave persons, who enjoy in society their reputation as safe men with no romantic nonsense, are far nearer to the understanding of a novel, however impassioned, than of a book of philosophy, wherein the author describes coldly the various stages of the malady of the soul called Love. The novel moves them a little; but before the philosophic treatise these sensible people are like blind men, who getting a description of the pictures in a museum read out to them, would say to the author: "You must agree, sir, that your work is horribly obscure." What is to happen if these blind men chance to be wits, established long since in possession of that title and with sovereign claims to clairvoyance? The poor author will be treated prettily. In fact, it is what happened to him at the time of the first edition. Several copies were actually burnt through the raging vanity of very clever people. I do not speak of insults all the more flattering for their fury: the author was proclaimed to be coarse, immoral, a writer for the people, a suspicious character, etc. In countries outworn by monarchy, these titles are the surest reward for whoever thinks good to write on morals and does not dedicate his book to the Mme. Dubarry of the day. Blessed literature, if it were not in fashion, and interested those alone for whom it was written!

In the time of the Cid, Corneille was nothing for M. le Marquis de Danjeau[3] but "a good fellow." Today the whole world thinks itself made to read M. de Lamartine: so much the better for his publisher, but so much the worse, and a hundred times the worse, for that great poet. In our days genius offers accommodation to people to whom, under penalty of losing caste, it should never so much as give a thought.

The laborious and active, very estimable and very positive life of a counsellor of State, of a manufacturer of cotton goods or of a banker with a keen eye for loans finds its reward in millions, not in tender sensation. Little by little the heart of these gentlemen ossifies: the positive and the useful are for them everything, and their soul is closed to that feeling, which of all others has the greatest need of our leisure and makes us most unfit for any rational and steady occupation.

The only object of this preface is to proclaim that this book has the misfortune of being incomprehensible to all who have not found time to play the fool. Many people will feel offended and I trust they will go no further.