"Gentlemen, would you like to hear a beautiful tale of love and death?" Nothing in the world could please us more. Effectively; this beginning of Tristan and Isolde, in one of its primitive versions, is the prototype of the beginning of a novelesque story. It establishes the concordance between love and death; It awakens in us the deepest resonances.

Love and death, mortal love: if it is not all poetry, it is at least all that is popular, all that is universally emotional, in our literatures. Happy love has no history. Only mortal love is novelistic; Only love threatened and condemned by one's life can be exalted by lyricism. It is a verifiable fact: Western man, through his literature and lyrics, loves at least as much what he destroys as what ensures "the happiness of the spouses". Where can such a contradiction come from? If the secret of the crisis of marriage lies in the lure of the forbidden, where does this taste for misfortune come from? What ideal of love presupposes? What secret of our existence, of our spirit, perhaps of our history, is revealed?