In the first place, I found her wanting in the qualities of mind which distinguish Frenchwomen and make them so delightful to love; as all those who have had the opportunity of loving in both countries declare.  When a Frenchwoman loves she is metamorphosed; her noted coquetry is used to deck her love; she abandons her dangerous vanity and lays no claim to any merit but that of loving well.  She espouses the interests, the hatreds, the friendships, of the man she loves; she acquires in a day the experience of a man of business; she studies the code, she comprehends the mechanism of credit, and could manage a banker’s office; naturally heedless and prodigal, she will make no mistakes and waste not a single louis.  She becomes, in turn, mother, adviser, doctor, giving to all her transformations a grace of happiness which reveals, in its every detail, her infinite love.  She combines the special qualities of the women of other countries and gives unity to the mixture by her wit, that truly French product, which enlivens, sanctions, justifies, and varies all, thus relieving the monotony of a sentiment which rests on a single tense of a single verb.  The Frenchwoman loves always, without abatement and without fatigue, in public or in solitude.  In public she uses a tone which has meaning for one only; she speaks by silence; she looks at you with lowered eyelids.  If the occasion prevents both speech and look she will use the sand and write a word with the point of her little foot; her love will find expression even in sleep; in short, she bends the world to her love.  The Englishwoman, on the contrary, makes her love bend to the world.  Educated to maintain the icy manners, the Britannic and egotistic deportment which I described to you, she opens and shuts her heart with the ease of a British mechanism.  She possesses an impenetrable mask, which she puts on or takes off phlegmatically.  Passionate as an Italian when no eye sees her, she becomes coldly dignified before the world.  A lover may well doubt his empire when he sees the immobility of face, the aloofness of countenance, and hears the calm voice, with which an Englishwoman leaves her boudoir.  Hypocrisy then becomes indifference; she has forgotten all.

Certainly the woman who can lay aside her love like a garment may be thought to be capable of changing it.  What tempests arise in the heart of a man, stirred by wounded self-love, when he sees a woman taking and dropping and again picking up her love like a piece of embroidery.  These women are too completely mistresses of themselves ever to belong wholly to you; they are too much under the influence of society ever to let you reign supreme.  Where a Frenchwoman comforts by a look, or betrays her impatience with visitors by witty jests, an Englishwoman’s silence is absolute; it irritates the soul and frets the mind.  These women are so constantly, and, under all circumstances, on their dignity, that to most of them fashion reigns omnipotent even over their