The poor girl shewed me her drawings; they were fine, and I praised them, without alluding particularly to Eve, and without venturing a joke upon Adam.  I asked her, for the sake of saying something, why she did not try to render her talent remunerative by learning pastel drawing.

“I wish I could,” she answered, “but the box of chalks alone costs two sequins.”

“Will you forgive me if I am bold enough to offer you six?”

“Alas!  I accept them gratefully, and to be indebted to you for such a service makes me truly happy.”

Unable to keep back her tears, she turned her head round to conceal them from me, and I took that opportunity of laying the money on the table, and out of politeness, wishing to spare her every unnecessary humiliation, I saluted her lips with a kiss which she was at liberty to consider a loving one, as I wanted her to ascribe my reserve to the respect I felt for her.  I then left her with a promise to call another day to see her father.  I never kept my promise.  The reader will see how I met her again after ten years.

How many thoughts crowded upon my mind as I left that house!  What a lesson!  I compared reality with the imagination, and I had to give the preference to the last, as reality is always dependent on it.  I then began to forsee a truth which has been clearly proved to me in my after life, namely, that love is only a feeling of curiosity more or less intense, grafted upon the inclination placed in us by nature that the species may be preserved.  And truly, woman is like a book, which, good or bad, must at first please us by the frontispiece.  If this is not interesting, we do not feel any wish to read the book, and our wish is in direct proportion to the interest we feel.  The frontispiece of woman runs from top to bottom like that of a book, and her feet, which are most important to every man who shares my taste, offer the same interest as the edition of the work.  If it is true that most amateurs bestow little or no attention upon the feet of a woman, it is likewise a fact that most readers care little or nothing whether a book is of the first edition or the tenth.  At all events, women are quite right to take the greatest care of their face, of their dress, of their general appearance; for it is only by that part of the frontispiece that they can call forth a wish to read them in those men who have not been endowed by nature with the privilege of blindness.  And just in the same manner that men, who have read a great many books, are certain to feel at last a desire for perusing new works even if they are bad, a man who has known many women, and all handsome women, feels at last a curiosity for ugly specimens when he meets with entirely new ones.  It is all very well for his eye to discover the paint which conceals the reality, but his passion has become a vice, and suggests some argument in favour of the lying frontispiece.  It is possible, at least he thinks so, that the work