ABSTRACT
Up to the death of Louis XIV France had been sedulously spiritualizing love. It had made of it a passion in the abstract, a revelation to be devoutly adored as a religion. It had endowed it with a sacred speech, full of the refinements of formula proper to strict, ardent and actively practiced cults. It had dissimulated its material side in the immaterial nature of sentiment, the body of the god in his soul. Up to the eighteenth century love had been going about its business as if it hardly partook of the senses at all, as if it were, in men and women alike, an instinct of generosity and nobility, of courage and delicacy. Its code required the utmost proof and probity of passion, zeal and care, untiring perseverance, obeisance and oaths, gratitude and discretion. It had to be sued with prayers that implore and prostrations that praise; and it clothed its infirmities in so many seeming proprieties, its worst scandals in an air so impressive, that its shortcomings and even its shames seemed always to preserve a certain decency, a saving grace, almost an inveterate innocence. The age of chivalry had left to the enlightened civilization of France an ideal of love, originally heroic, and still, in the Golden Age, an ideal of breeding. But in the eighteenth century what has become of that ideal? In the days of Louis XV love is desire, and its ideal pleasure.
