Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/168

 come to you, is love, my child,” said the old man, with an expression of profound sadness, “it is love in its sacred simplicity, love as it should be; involuntary, swift, come as a thief who takes all—yes, all! And I expected it. I have studied women well, and know that, if love only masters most of them after many proofs and miracles of affection, if those women never break their silence and only yield when conquered, there are others who, under the influence of a sympathy which is accounted for nowadays by magnetic fluids, are overcome in an instant. I can tell you this to-day; as soon as I saw the charming woman who bore your name, I felt that I should love her solely and faithfully, without knowing if our characters or our persons would agree. Has love got second sight? What answer can one give, after having seen so many unions celebrated under the auspices of so heavenly a contract, broken later on, engendering almost eternal hatred, and positive repulsion? The senses can, so to speak, mutually correspond and the ideas be at variance: and perhaps some people live more through ideas than through the feelings. On the other hand, characters often agree and the persons dislike each other. These two utterly different phenomena, which would account for many misfortunes, prove the wisdom of the laws which allow the parents the upper hand in the marriages of their children; for a young girl is often the dupe of one of these two hallucinations. Therefore I do not blame you. The sensations that you experience,