A tactful social critic, an exacting scholar of world stature, a writer, an author, and a thinker, a member of the French Academy ... it is not his country alone that boasts of him; rather, he is a son of all humanity.

Love — and I mean by it something that passes beyond the satisfaction of a ... appetite — is romantic love, which ... leisure time and an untroubled mind. In wealthy, pleasure-loving circles, such as the court of ..., or, nearer our own age, in what the books on society in the last century tell us ... in a word, the people of bygone days never once lacked hours of leisure; rather, they loved and made merry in every season.

But as for us, living in the world after the ..., toiling, if for nothing else, only for the necessities of life, from morning ... supper — how far are we from any broad, extended time in which love may graze and sway?

How many a married man in a great city, or anywhere at all, comes back to his house after the toil of a whole day with the ways of courtship and its theses on his lips? Or has time left us any men of pleasure and luxury like the heroes of Bourget and Maupassant?

It is as though I saw the god of love gazing at a throng of men and women, every one of them the slave of some machine, one hurrying to the factory and

another to the bank, packing the buses and vying for the trains; as though I saw him leaning on his bow, which rust has overgrown, in sorrow, watching for vacation time to come, and sighing until the months of July and August arrive.

And what does he see then? Here they are, couple after couple — some stretched out on the sands of the shore in half-nakedness, some embracing the grass in the shade of the trees, some winding along a narrow mountain path; and in this fevered tableau pleasure reigns and desire holds sway over individuals bound, perhaps, by ties of a love that was not equal to what they hold in store. In truth — what time is as favorable to love affairs as vacation time, when love fills thoughts and souls before any other concern, under the sway of the beauty of nature and of travels that shed an enchanting color over living creatures, and when every means of acquaintance and chance meeting is at hand?

Take, for example, a young man from some town, whose eyes for eleven months have not gone beyond the girls of that town, whom he has known since his boyhood. He might well be able to choose the girl of his dreams from among them should the need arise, but for one reason or another the opportunity to realize his hopes has not come his way. Suddenly he finds himself, thanks to a vacation granted him, at a meeting-place with girls from thirty-six thousand districts (as in France), amid the pleasantest circumstances, the longest hours, and the sweetest mutual communions — to say nothing of the sweetness of solitude on lonely walks. And if we leave innocence aside, the vacation's great prize, for the "Don Juan," is the opening of the hunting season: there he is, and here is this nymph lying half-naked on the sand while her guardian is absorbed in fishing or entangled in ruin at the gaming table. As for the vacation of the husband devoted to his wife, it is the opportunity he has long awaited to renew their acquaintance; in it the clouds of care and weariness lift, and their true personalities come forth in a new and enchanting