dominated by temper, and silences reason; otherwise I shall say that
it is not a love affair you want, but to set up housekeeping.




V

Love and Temper


Oh, I agree with you, Marquis, a woman who has only temper and
caprices is very thorny for an acquaintance and in the end only
repels. I agree again that these irregularities must make of love a
never ending quarrel, a continual storm. Therefore, it is not for a
person of this character that I advise you to form an attachment. You
always go beyond my ideas. I only depicted to you in my last letter an
amiable woman, one who becomes still more so by a shade of diversity,
and you speak only of an unpleasant woman, who has nothing but
ungracious things to say. How we have drifted away from the point!

When I spoke of temper I only meant the kind which gives a stronger
relish, anxiety, and a little jealousy: that, in a word, which springs
from love alone, and not from natural brutality, that roughness which
one ordinarily calls "bad temper." When it is love which makes a woman
rough, when that alone is the cause of her liveliness, what sort can
the lover be who has so little delicacy as to complain of it? Do not
these errors prove the violence of passion? For myself, I have always
thought that he who knew how to keep himself within proper bounds,
was moderately amorous. Can one be so, in effect, without allowing