Pleasing and governing women may, in time, be of great service to you.  They often please and govern others.  ‘A propos’, are you in love with Madame de Berkenrode still, or has some other taken her place in your affections?  I take it for granted, that ’qua to cumque domat Venus, non erubescendis adurit ignibus.  Un arrangement honnete sied bien a un galant homme’.  In that case I recommend to you the utmost discretion, and the profoundest silence.  Bragging of, hinting at, intimating, or even affectedly disclaiming and denying such an arrangement will equally discredit you among men and women.  An unaffected silence upon that subject is the only true medium.

In your commerce with women, and indeed with men too, ’une certaine douceur’ is particularly engaging; it is that which constitutes that character which the French talk of so much, and so justly value, I mean ‘l’aimable’.  This ‘douceur’ is not so easily described as felt.  It is the compound result of different things; a complaisance, a flexibility, but not a servility of manners; an air of softness in the countenance, gesture, and expression, equally whether you concur or differ with the person you converse with.  Observe those carefully who have that ‘douceur’ that charms you and others; and your own good sense will soon enable you to discover the different ingredients of which it is composed.  You must be more particularly attentive to this ‘douceur’, whenever you are obliged to refuse what is asked of you, or to say what in itself cannot be very agreeable to those to whom you say it.  It is then the necessary gilding of a disagreeable pill.  ‘L’aimable’ consists in a thousand of these little things aggregately.  It is the ‘suaviter in modo’, which I have so often recommended to you.  The respectable, Mr. Harte assures me, you do not want, and I believe him.  Study, then, carefully; and acquire perfectly, the ‘Aimable’, and you will have everything.

Abbe Guasco, who is another of your panegyrists, writes me word that he has taken you to dinner at Marquis de St. Germain’s; where you will be welcome as often as you please, and the oftener the better.  Profit of that, upon the principle of traveling in different countries, without changing places.  He says, too, that he will take you to the parliament, when any remarkable cause is to be tried.  That is very well; go through the several chambers of the parliament, and see and hear what they are doing; join practice and observation to your theoretical knowledge of their rights and privileges.  No Englishman has the least notion of them.

I need not recommend you to go to the bottom of the constitutional and political knowledge of countries; for Mr. Harte tells me that you have a peculiar turn that way, and have informed yourself most correctly of them.

I must now put some queries to you, as to a ‘juris publici peritus’, which I am sure you can answer me, and which I own I cannot answer myself; they are upon a subject now much talked of.