The Line of Love

to be cajoled into perpetuation of mankind), you have, in either event, conceded that to live unbefooled by love is at best a shuffling and debt-dodging business, and you have granted this unreasoned, transitory surrender to be the most high and, indeed, the one requisite action which living affords.

Beyond that is silence. If you succeed in proving love a species of madness, you have but demonstrated that there is something more profoundly pivotal than sanity, and for the sanest logician this is a disastrous gambit: whereas if, in well-nigh obsolete fashion, you confess the universe to be a weightier matter than the contents of your skull, and your wits a somewhat slender instrument wherewith to plumb infinity⁠—why, then you will recall that it is written God is love, and this recollection, too, is conducive to a fine taciturnity.

Explicit linea amoris

Endnotes

1. Nicolas indeed declares of Adhelmar, earlier in the tale, in such high terms as are not uncommon to this chronicle:

   Hardi estait et fier comme lions,
   Et si faisait balades et chançons,
   Rondeaulx et laiz, très bans et pleins de grâce,
   Comme Orpheus, cet menestrier de Thrace.

   ↩

2. There is humor in his deposition that Gilles and Ysabeau and he were loitering before Saint Benoit’s in friendly discourse⁠—“pour soy esbatre.” Perhaps René prompted this; but in itself, it is characteristic of Montcorbier that he trenched on perjury, blithely, in order to screen Ysabeau. ↩

Colophon

The Line of Love
was published in 1921 by
James Branch Cabell.

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Lady Adeliza Came Upon the Balcony,
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