I had forgotten to quarrel with you about your treatment of me.  You have been so indiscreet as to show my recent letters to M. de la Rochefoucauld.  I will cease writing you if you continue to divulge my secret.  I am willing to talk personally with him about my ideas, but I am far from flattering myself that I write well enough to withstand the criticism of a reader like him.

XXXIX

The True Value of Compliments Among Women

The marks left by the smallpox on the Marquise’s face have set her wild.  Her resolution not to show herself for a long time does not surprise me.  How could she appear in public in such a state?  If the accident which humiliates her had not happened, how she would have made the poor Chevalier suffer!  Does not this prove that female virtue depends upon circumstances, and diminishes with pride?

How I fear a similar example in the case of the Countess!  Nothing is more dangerous for a woman than the weaknesses of her friend; love, already too seductive in itself, becomes more so through the contagion of example, if I may so speak; it is not only in our heart that it gathers strength; it acquires new weapons against reason from its environment.  A woman who has fallen under its ban, deems herself interested, for her own justification, in conducting her friend to the edge of the same precipice, and I am not, therefore, surprised at what the Marquise says in your favor.  Up to the present moment they have been guided by the same principles; what a shame, then, for her, that the Countess could not have been guaranteed against the effects of it!  Now, the Marquise has a strong reason the more for contributing to the defeat of her friend; she has become positively ugly, and consequently obliged to be more complaisant in retaining a lover.  Will she suffer another woman to keep hers at a less cost?  That would be to recognize too humiliating a superiority, and I can assure you that she will do the most singular things to bring her amiable widower up to the point.

If she succeed, how much I fear everything will be changed!  To have been as beautiful as another woman, and to be so no longer, although she embellishes herself every day, and to suffer her presence every day, is, I vow, an effort beyond the strength of the most reasonable woman, greater than the most determined philosophy.  Among women friendship ceases where rivalry begins.  By rivalry, I mean that of beauty only, it would be too much to add that of sentiment.

I foresee this with regret, but it is my duty to forewarn you.  Whatever precautions the Countess may take to control the amour propre of the Marquise, she will never make anything else out of her than an ingrate.  I do not know by what fatality, everything a beautiful woman tells one who is no longer beautiful, assumes in the mouth, an impression of a commiseration which breaks down the most carefully devised management, and humiliates her whom it is thought to console.  The more a woman strives to efface the superiority she possesses over an unfortunate sister woman, the more she makes that superiority apparent, until the latter reaches the opinion that it is only through generosity that she is permitted to occupy the subordinate position left her.