Shall we see you to-morrow at Madame la Presidente’s?  If you should desire to have an occasion to speak to her, I do not doubt that you will make your peace.

XLIII

Women Demand Respect

I should never have expected it, Marquis.  What!  My zeal in your behalf has drawn your reproaches down upon me?  I share with the Countess the bad humor her severity has caused! you.  Do you know?  If what you say were well founded, nothing could be more piquant for me than the ironical tone in which you laud my principles.  But to render me responsible for your success, as you attempt, have you dared think for an instant that my object in writing you, was ever for the purpose of giving you lessons in seduction?  Do you not perceive any difference in teaching you to please, and exciting you toward seduction?  I have told you the motives which incline women to love, it is true, but have I ever said that they were easier to vanquish?  Have I ever told you to attack them by sensuality, and that in attacking them to suppose them without delicacy?  I do not believe it.

When your inexperience and your timidity might cause you to play the role of a ridiculous personage among women, I explained the harm these defects might cause you in the world.  I advised you to have more confidence, in order to lead you insensibly in the direction of that noble and respectful boldness you should have when with women.  But as soon as I saw that your pretensions were going too far, and that they might wound the reputation of the Countess, I did not dissimulate, I took sides against you, and nothing was more reasonable, I had become her friend.  You see, then, how unjust you are in my regard, and you are no less so in regard to her.  You treat her as if she were an equivocal character.  According to your idea, she has neither decided for nor against gallantry, and what you clearly see in her conduct is, that she is a more logical coquette than other women.  What an opinion!

But there is much to pardon in your situation.  However, a man without prejudice, would see in the Countess only a lover as reasonable as she is tender; a woman who, without having an ostentatious virtue, nevertheless remains constantly attached to it; a woman, in a word, who seeks in good faith the proper means of reconciling love and duty.  The difficulty in allying these two contraries is not slight, and it is the source of the inequalities that wound you.  Figure to yourself the combats she must sustain, the revolutions she suffers, her embarrassment in endeavoring to preserve a lover whom too uniform a resistance might repel.  If she were sure of keeping you by resisting your advances; but you carry your odd conduct to the extent of leaving her when her resistance is too prolonged.  While praising our virtue, you abandon us, and then, what shame for us!  But since in both cases it is not certain that her lover will be held, it is preferable to accept the inconvenient rather than cause you to lose her heart and her esteem.