commendation of people who judge me without knowing me. Whatever may
happen, I shall continue to talk to you with my ordinary frankness,
and I am sure that Madame de Sevigne, in spite of her refined mind,
will, at heart, be more of my opinion than she cares to show. Now, I
come to what relates to you.

Well, Marquis, after infinite care and trouble, you think you have at
last softened that stony heart? I am glad of it; but I laugh at your
interpretation of the Countess' sentiments. You share with all men a
common error which it is necessary to remove, however flattering it
may be to you to foster it. You believe, every one of you, that it is
your worth alone that kindles passion in the heart of women, and that
qualities of heart and mind are the causes of the love they feel
toward you. What a mistake! You only think so, it is true, because
your pride finds satisfaction in the thought. But, if you can do so
without prejudice, inquire into the motives that actuate you, and you
will soon perceive that you are laboring under a delusion, and that we
deceive you; that, everything well considered, you are the dupe of
your vanity and of ours; that the worth of the person loved is only an
excuse which gives an occasion for love, and is not the real cause.
Finally, that all this sublime by-play, which is paraded on both
sides, is a mere preliminary which enters into the desire to satisfy
the need I first indicated to you as the prime exciting cause of this
passion. I tell you this is a hard and humiliating truth, but it is
none the less certain. We women enter the world with this necessity of
loving undefined, and if we take one man in preference to another, let
us say so honestly, we yield less to the knowledge of merit than to a
mechanical instinct which is nearly always blind.

For proof of this I need only refer to the foolish passions with which
we sometimes become intoxicated for strangers, or at least for men
with whom we are not sufficiently acquainted, to relieve our selection
of them from the odium of imprudence from the beginning; in which case
if there is a mutual response, well, it is pure chance. We are always
forming attachments without sufficient circumspection, hence I am not
wrong in comparing love to an appetite which one sometimes feels for
one kind of food rather than for another, without being able to give
the reason. I am very cruel to thus dissipate the phantoms of your
self love, but I am telling you the