A young man, therefore, in entering the world, cannot be too attentive to conciliate the goodwill of women.  Their approbation and support will serve him instead of a thousand good qualities.  Their judgment dispenses with fortune, talent, and even intelligence.  “Les hommes font les lois:  les femmes font les reputations.”

The desire of pleasing is, of course, the basis of social connexion.  Persons who enter society with the intention of producing an effect, and of being distinguished, however clever they may be, are never agreeable.  They are always tiresome, and often ridiculous.  Persons, who enter life with such pretensions, have no opportunity for improving themselves and profiting by experience.  They are not in a proper state to observe:  indeed, they look only for the effect which they produce, and with that they are not often gratified.  They thrust themselves into all conversations, indulge in continual anecdotes, which are varied only by dull disquisitions, listen to others with impatience and heedlessness, and are angry that they seem to be attending to themselves.  Such men go through scenes of pleasure, enjoying nothing.  They are equally disagreeable to themselves and others.  Young men should, therefore, content themselves with being natural.  Let them present themselves with a modest assurance:  let them observe, hear, and examine, and before long they will rival their models.

The conversation of those women who are not the most lavishly supplied with personal beauty, will be of the most advantage to the young aspirant.  Such persons have cultivated their manners and conversation more than those who can rely upon their natural endowments.  The absence of pride and pretension has improved their good nature and their affability.  They are not too much occupied in contemplating their own charms, to be disposed to indulge in gentle criticism on others.  One acquires from them an elegance in one’s manners as well as one’s expressions.  Their kindness pardons every error, and to instruct or reprove, their acts are so delicate that the lesson which they give, always without offending, is sure to be profitable, though it may be often unperceived.

Women observe all the delicacies of propriety in manners, and all the shades of impropriety, much better than men; not only because they attend to them earlier and longer, but because their perceptions are more refined than those of the other sex, who are habitually employed about greater things.  Women divine, rather than arrive at, proper conclusions.

The whims and caprices of women in society should of course be tolerated by men, who themselves require toleration for greater inconveniences.  But this must not be carried too far.  There are certain limits to empire which, if they themselves forget, should be pointed out to them with delicacy and politeness.  You should be the slave of women, but not of all their fancies.