of too monotonous a temperament; her monotony satiates and disgusts.  She is always the same statue, with her a man is always right.  She is so good, so gentle, that she takes away from people the privilege of quarreling with her, and this is often such a great pleasure!  Put in her place a vivacious woman, capricious, decided, to a certain limit, however, and things assume a different aspect.  The lover will find in the same person the pleasure of variety.  Temper is the salt, the quality which prevents it from becoming stale.  Restlessness, jealousy, quarrels, making friends again, spitefulness, all are the food of love.  Enchanting variety! which fills, which occupies a sensitive heart much more deliciously than the regularity of behavior, and the tiresome monotony which is called “good disposition.”

I know how you men must be governed.  A caprice puts you in an uncertainty, which you have as much trouble and grief in dispelling as though it were a victory obtained over a new object.  Roughness makes you hold your breath.  You do not stop disputing, but neither do you cease to conquer and to be conquered.  In vain does reason sigh.  You can not comprehend how such an imp manages to subjugate you so tyrannically.  Everything tells you that the idol of your heart is a collection of caprices and follies, but she is a spoiled child, whom you can not help but love.  The efforts which reflection causes you to make to loosen them, serve only to forge still tighter your chains; for love is never so strong as when you believe it ready to break away in the heat of a quarrel.  It loves, it storms; with it, everything is convulsive.  Would you reduce it to rule?  It languishes, it expires.  In a word, this is what I wanted to say; do not take for a mistress a woman who has only reliable qualities; but one who is sometimes dominated by temper, and silences reason; otherwise I shall say that it is not a love affair you want, but to set up housekeeping.

V

Love and Temper

Oh, I agree with you, Marquis, a woman who has only temper and caprices is very thorny for an acquaintance and in the end only repels.  I agree again that these irregularities must make of love a never ending quarrel, a continual storm.  Therefore, it is not for a person of this character that I advise you to form an attachment.  You always go beyond my ideas.  I only depicted to you in my last letter an amiable woman, one who becomes still more so by a shade of diversity, and you speak only of an unpleasant woman, who has nothing but ungracious things to say.  How we have drifted away from the point!