with the precision of your memory, etc.? If you have only such
advantages, Marquis, if you have no charming accomplishments to offset
your crudity--I can vouch for their opinion--far from pleasing women,
you will seem to them like a critic of whom they will be afraid, and
you will place them under so much constraint, that the enjoyment they
might have permitted themselves in your society will be banished. Why,
indeed, try to be amiable toward a man who is a source of anxiety to
you by his nonchalance, who does not unbosom himself? Women are not at
their ease except with those who take chances with them, and enter
into their spirit. In a word, too much circumspection gives others a
chill like that felt by a man who goes out of a warm room into a cold
wind. I intended to say that habitual reserve locks the doors of the
hearts of those who associate with us; they have no room to expand.

You must also bear this in mind, Marquis, that in cases of gallantry,
your first advances must be made under the most favorable
circumstances. You must have read somewhere, that one pleases more by
agreeable faults than by essential qualities. Great virtues are like
pieces of gold of which one makes less use than of ordinary currency.

This idea calls to my mind those people who, in place of our kind of
money, use shells as their medium of exchange. Well, do you imagine
that these people are not so rich as we with all the treasures of the
new world? We might, at first blush, take this sort of wealth as
actual poverty, but we should be quickly undeceived upon reflection,
for metals have no value except in opinion. Our gold would be false
money to those people. Now, the qualities you call essential are not
worth any more in cases of gallantry, where only pebbles are
sufficient. What matters the conventional mark provided there is
commerce?