washes off rouge. We know women of that sort--the thorough-bred
Parisienne. Have you ever noticed a grisette tripping along the street?
Her face is as good as a picture. A pretty cap, fresh cheeks, trim hair,
a guileful smile, and the rest of her almost neglected. Is not this true
to the life? Well, that is the Parisienne. She knows that her face is
all that will be seen, so she devotes all her care, finery, and vanity
to her head. The Duchess is the same; the head is everything with her.
She can only feel through her intellect, her heart lies in her brain,
she is a sort of intellectual epicure, she has a head-voice. We call
that kind of poor creature a Lais of the intellect. You have been taken
in like a boy. If you doubt it, you can have proof of it tonight, this
morning, this instant. Go up to her, try the demand as an experiment,
insist peremptorily if it is refused. You might set about it like the
late Marechal de Richelieu, and get nothing for your pains."

Armand was dumb with amazement.

"Has your desire reached the point of infatuation?"

"I want her at any cost!" Montriveau cried out despairingly.

"Very well. Now, look here. Be as inexorable as she is herself. Try to
humiliate her, to sting her vanity. Do _not_ try to move her heart,
nor her soul, but the woman's nerves and temperament, for she is both
nervous and lymphatic. If you can once awaken desire in her, you are
safe. But you must drop these romantic boyish notions of yours. If when
once you have her in your eagle's talons you yield a point or draw back,
if you so much as stir an eyelid, if she thinks that she can regain her
ascendancy over you, she will slip out of your clutches like a fish, and
you will never catch her again. Be as inflexible as law. Show no more
charity than the headsman. Hit hard, and then hit again. Strike and keep
on striking as if you were giving her the knout. Duchesses are made of
hard stuff, my dear Armand; there is a sort of feminine nature that is
only softened by repeated blows; and as suffering develops a heart in
women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod.
Do you persevere. Ah! when pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and
softened the fibres that you take to be so pliant and yielding; when
a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under
this discipline; when the brain has capitulated--then, perhaps, passion
may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that tu