The Impossible Love and Truth is hardly a novel, it is a chronicle, and the dedication left to it attests to its reality. It is the story of one of those women like the elegant and idle classes - the high life of a country where the word aristocracy should no longer even be pronounced - offered us so much the model At that time, if we remember, the youngest, the most beautiful, and, I would dare add, the most perfect physiologically women, boasted of their coldness, as old fats boast of being jaded, even before being old. Singular hypocrites, they played, some at the angel, the others at the demon, but all, angels or demons, claimed to have a horror of emotion, this vulgar thing, and brought intrepidly, as proof of their personal and social distinction, to be unfit for the love and happiness that it gives ... It was inane that it had to be said, for such affectations are ineptitude. But what do you want? this novel which will go away, if it is not already gone, where Astrea and Clélie have gone, and where all the false books, conceived outside, will go