physiology most closely? The great apes, so intelligent in their youth, become idiotic and cruel as soon as they reach puberty. There is a cape there which they never double. A few men succeed; their intelligence escapes shipwreck, and they float free and smiling on the tranquillized sea. Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand; it poisons the blood of the commonalty of men. Women succumb even more surely to this crisis. Those who have been intelligent in their critical age is past. In both sexes there are two successive crisis: the sexual crisis and the sensual crisis. The first comes at a fixed period for the individuals of the same race and the same environment. The second generally coincides with 'the completion of growth, with the state of physiological perfection. Sometimes, when decline is beginning, a third crisis occurs, which is like the first, inasmuch as it almost always brings with it a condition of sentimentality. Hervart, I feel almost sure, is going through this crisis now; Hortense and I are at the second; Rose is undergoing the first."
Leonor, like many of his contemporaries,
