converse
with actresses without love-making. You must make it, or pretend to make
it. This is the only way to guide them to their own advantage. Love
moulds and kneads them in flesh, bones, and marrow. Love begins to be
their guiding-star at the age of five or six. In this respect, I soon
discovered that the austerity of Sacchi's company was a barren formula;
just as I had previously noticed that strictness in private families,
beyond a certain point, had ceased to be accounted of utility or value.

Among actresses, the term friendship is something fabulous and
visionary. They immediately substitute the word love, and do not attend
to distinctions. Their idea of friendship only serves as the means of
mutual deception between women, accompanied by deluges of endearing
phrases and Judas kisses.

I ought, however, to declare that the actresses of Sacchi's company
carried on their love-affairs with prudence and without indecency. The
ideal of severity which prevailed there bore at least these fruits of
goodness; and the ideal of honesty produced notably different results
from those which other systems in the trade of love elicited elsewhere.
How many actresses lay siege deliberately and in cold blood to their
lovers, despoil them of their property, and do their very best to suck
them dry! Catching at the locks of what they call their fortune and I
call their infamy, these women do not stop to see whether the path
before them be clean or filthy. They worship wickedness and abhor good
living, if they hope to fill their purse or gratify their cupidity by
the former. Though they strive to cloak their baseness with the veil of
verbal decency, and do all in their power to preserve external decorum,
they trample in their souls on shame and sing this verse:--

"Colla vergogna io gia mi sono avvezza."

("With infamy I long have been at home.")

For the actresses of Sacchi's company, it is only justice to assert
that they were far removed from harbouring such sentiments of vile and
degrading venality.

There are two phrases in the slang of the profession; one is
_miccheggiare_, which means to cozen folk out of their money by
wheedling; the other is _gonzo_, gull or cully, the foolish lover who
believes himself an object of affection, and squanders all his fortune
under the influence of this impression. I must declare that the women of
Sacchi's company never put the arts which these words imply into
practice. They made