“At the age of seventeen I became attached to a young girl, to whom I owe the sort of life which I adopted.  I was not uncomely then, I had a mild disposition and affectionate ways.  The decorum which I noticed in the girl had drawn my attention to her beauty.  I found in her, moreover, so much indifference to her charms, that I would have sworn she was ignorant of them.  How simple minded I was at that time!  What a pleasure, said I to myself, if I can win the love of a girl who does not care to have lovers, since she is beautiful without observing it, and hence is no coquette!  I never left her without my affectionate surprise increasing at the sight of so many graces in a person who was not the more vain because of it.  Were she seated or standing, speaking or walking, it always seemed to me that she was absolutely artless, and that she thought of nothing less than appearing to be what she was.

“One day in the country, when I had just left her, a forgotten glove caused me to retrace my steps to get it.  I perceived the beauty in the distance, regarding herself in a mirror, and I noticed, to my great astonishment, that she was picturing herself to herself in all the phases in which, during our conversation, I had seen her face, and it turned out that the expressions of her countenance, which I had thought so unaffected, were, to name them correctly, only tricks; I judged from a distance that her vanity adopted certain ones, that it improved upon others; they were little ways that one might have noted down and that a woman might have learned like a musical air.  I trembled for the risk which I should have run, if I had had the misfortune to experience again in good faith her deceptions, at the point of perfection to which her cleverness had carried them; but I had believed her natural, and had loved her only on that footing; so that my love ceased immediately, as if my heart had been only conditionally moved.  She, in turn, perceived me in the mirror, and blushed.  As for me, I entered laughing, and picking up my glove:  ’Ah! mademoiselle, I beg your pardon,’ I said to her, ’for having, up to this time, attributed to nature charms, the whole honour of which is due to your ingenuity alone.’  ‘What is the matter?  What does this speech mean?’ was her reply.  ‘Shall I speak to you more frankly?’ I said to her:  ’I have just seen the machinery of the Opera; it will still divert me, but it will touch me less.’  Thereupon I went out, and it is from this adventure that there sprang up in me that misanthropy which has not left me, and which has caused me to pass my life in examining mankind, and in amusing myself with my reflexions."[13]