'You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré's ideal of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.'
'Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with her irons would have become very tiresome to him.'
'What an argument in favour of ignorance!'
'Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.'
'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially a _bourgeois_ ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the _bourgeois_ ideal from their earliest times of wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.'
The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.
'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the _bourgeois_ ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are its characteristics and its results.'
'The first is exigence and the second is _ennui_.'
'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'
'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'