Explore "The Chair Mender" by Guy De Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was at the end of the dinner opening the hunting season, at the house of Marquis de Bertrans. Eleven hunters, eight young women, and the doctor of the neighbourhood were seated around the large, well-lit table covered with fruits and flowers.
They came to speak of love, and a great discussion arose, the eternal discussion, as to whether one could love truly but once or many times. They cited examples of people who had never had but one serious love; they also cited other examples of others who had loved often, violently. The men, generally, pretended that passion, like a malady, could strike the same person many times, and strike to kill if an obstacle appeared in his path. Although the point of view was not contestable, the women, whose opinion depended upon literature rather than on observation, affirmed that love, true love, great love, could come only once upon a mortal; that it was like a thunderbolt, this love, and that a heart once touched by it remained ever after so vacant, ravaged, and burned out that no other powerful sentiment, even a dream, could again take root.