6 ideas
Once love begins, the lover's mind converts every circumstance into evidence of the beloved's perfection, attaching imagined qualities to her the way salt crystals coat a bare branch. The process works through the lover's own desire to be happy. Anything that would give pleasure gets credited to the beloved, so the adored person becomes a surface for projected wishes.
A leafless winter branch thrown into the abandoned workings of the Salzburg salt mines is pulled out two or three months later covered in glittering crystals. The original twig can no longer be recognised. The image shows that what the lover sees is mostly deposit rather than substance, and that the deposit builds up through immersion and time, not through anything the branch does.
Love develops in sequence. First comes admiration, then the thought of how delightful it would be to kiss and be kissed, then hope, and then love is born as the pleasure of seeing and touching. The first crystallisation follows, then doubt, which raises the question of whether one is really loved. The final stage is a second, stronger crystallisation. Each stage depends on the previous one, and hope is the hinge: with no hope at all, crystallisation never starts.
Uncertainty about whether one is loved in return makes the lover dwell on the beloved. In that anxious rumination a second crystallisation forms, more tenacious than the first, built from repeated reassurances such as "she does love me." Easy, certain success therefore produces weaker attachment than pursuit that swings between fear and hope.
Stendhal separates four kinds of love: - Passion-love, which is absorbing and self-forgetting. - Mannered or gallant love, a pleasant social performance governed by taste and convention. - Physical love, rooted in sensual pleasure. - Vanity-love, where the partner functions as a status possession. The others imitate its outward forms while serving pleasure, propriety or pride.
Beauty is not an objective property but "only the promise of happiness," so each person finds beautiful whatever signals the particular happiness they want. Once someone is loved, even their defects, such as a smallpox scar, become beautiful because they are tied to her and remind the lover of her. Attraction therefore reveals the perceiver's desires more than the object's qualities.