That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest man's case. Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book to all but a very select few--"a hundred readers only": they are rather warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's _De l'Amour_ justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures--not even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that the twentieth would find his ideas …
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