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 truth. You are flattered by the
love of a woman, because you believe it implies the worthiness of the
object loved. You do her too much honor: let us say rather, that you
have too good an opinion of yourself. Understand that it is not for
yourself that we love you, to speak with sincerity, it is our own
happiness we seek. Caprice, interest, vanity, disposition, the
uneasiness that affects our hearts when they are unoccupied, these are
the sources of the great sentiment we wish to deify! It is not great
qualities that affect us; if they enter for anything into the reasons
which determine us in your favor, it is not the heart which receives
the impression, it is vanity; and the greater part of the things in
you which please us, very often makes you ridiculous or contemptible.

But, what will you have? We need an admirer who can entertain us with
ideas of our perfections; we need an obliging person who will submit