humor her severity has caused! you. Do you know? If what you say
were well founded, nothing could be more piquant for me than the
ironical tone in which you laud my principles. But to render me
responsible for your success, as you attempt, have you dared think for
an instant that my object in writing you, was ever for the purpose of
giving you lessons in seduction? Do you not perceive any difference in
teaching you to please, and exciting you toward seduction? I have told
you the motives which incline women to love, it is true, but have I
ever said that they were easier to vanquish? Have I ever told you to
attack them by sensuality, and that in attacking them to suppose them
without delicacy? I do not believe it.

When your inexperience and your timidity might cause you to play the
role of a ridiculous personage among women, I explained the harm these
defects might cause you in the world. I advised you to have more
confidence, in order to lead you insensibly in the direction of that
noble and respectful boldness you should have when with women. But as
soon as I saw that your pretensions were going too far, and that they
might wound the reputation of the Countess, I did not dissimulate, I
took sides against you, and nothing was more reasonable, I had become
her friend. You see, then, how unjust you are in my regard, and you
are no less so in regard to her. You treat her as if she were an
equivocal character. According to your idea, she has neither decided
for nor against gallantry, and what you clearly see in her conduct is,
that she is a more logical coquette than other women. What an opinion!

But there is much to pardon in your situation. However, a man without
prejudice, would see in the Countess only a lover as reasonable as she
is tender; a woman who, without having an ostentatious virtue,
nevertheless remains constantly attached to it; a woman, in a word,
who seeks in good faith the proper means of reconciling love and duty.
The difficulty in allying these two contraries is not slight, and it
is the source of the inequalities that wound you. Figure to yourself
the combats she must sustain, the revolutions she suffers, her
embarrassment in endeavoring to preserve a lover whom too uniform a
resistance might repel. If she were sure of keeping you by resisting
your advances; but you carry your odd conduct to the extent of leaving
her when her resistance is too prolonged. While praising our virtue,
you abandon us, and