d, a third, and a fourth. If the place is not already taken, depend
upon it, it may be conquered.

I am very glad you are going to Orli, and from thence to St. Cloud; go to
both, and to Versailles also, often. It is that interior domestic
familiarity with people of fashion, that alone can give you 'l'usage du
monde, et les manieres aisees'. It is only with women one loves, or men
one respects, that the desire of pleasing exerts itself; and without the
desire of pleasing no man living can please. Let that desire be the
spring of all your words and actions. That happy talent, the art of
pleasing, which so few do, though almost all might possess, is worth all
your learning and knowledge put together. The latter can never raise you
high without the former; but the former may carry you, as it has carried
thousands, a great way without the latter.

I am glad that you dance so well, as to be reckoned by Marcel among his
best scholars; go on, and dance better still. Dancing well is pleasing
'pro tanto', and makes a part of that necessary whole, which is composed
of a thousand parts, many of them of 'les infiniment petits quoi
qu'infiniment necessaires'.

I shall never have done upon this subject which is indispensably
necessary toward your making any figure or fortune in the world; both
which I have set my heart upon, and for both which you now absolutely
want no one thing but the art of pleasing; and I must not conceal from
you that you have still a good way to go before you arrive at it. You
still want a thousand of those little attentions that imply a desire of
pleasing: you want a 'douceur' of air and expression that engages: you
want an elegance and delicacy of expression, necessary to adorn the best
sense and most solid matter: in short, you still want a great deal of the
'brillant' and the 'poli'. Get them at any rate: sacrifice hecatombs of
books to them: seek for them in company, and renounce your closet till
you have got them. I never received the letter you refer to, if ever you
wrote it. Adieu, et bon soir, Monseigneur.

LETTER CXLV

GREENWICH, June 6, O. S. 1751.

MY DEAR FRIEND: Solicitous and anxious as I have ever been to form your
heart, your mind, and your manners, and to bring you as near perfection
as the imperfection of our natures will allow, I have exhausted, in the
course of our correspondence, all that my own mind could suggest, and
have borrowed from others whatever I thought could be usefu