Coquetry

Today we shall occupy ourselves with feminine coquetry, which is the enemy of love: it kills it or it belittles it, which is worse. The coquettish woman resembles a caged bird that, by its song, attracts the other birds to itself. She attracts men, whose hearts are torn against the bars that enclose her. We pity her more than them. Reduced to captivity by the narrowness of her ideas and by the aridity of her heart, she stamps about in the obscurity of her conscience, without ever being able to see shining the sun of love, which radiates only for generous and devoted souls. It is more difficult to feel love than to inspire it; nevertheless, everyone frets and scrutinizes the desired heart, without first examining whether his own possesses the coveted treasure. No; the love that is the sensuality of self-love is not love, just as coquetry is not seduction for an elevated soul. We are right to censure and to surround with difficulties those fragile bonds, that shameful exchange of vanities, of miseries of every kind. Love remains alien to those things, just as the ray of light is not stained by the filth it illuminates. Senseless are the women who do not understand that their beauty and their virtue represent love in its self-abandon, in the forgetting of personal interests and in the transmigration of the soul that gives itself entirely to the beloved being. God blesses the woman who has borne the yoke of love and repels the one who has made of that precious sentiment a trophy to her vanity, a distraction for her idleness, or a carnal flame that consumes the body, leaving the heart empty. Georges.

Allan Kardec.

Paris. — Typ. H. CARION, rue Bonaparte, 64.