dishonor. You can judge of our embarrassment. On the one hand, we are
consumed with the desire to have an audience to notice the effect of
our charms. Ever engaged in schemes to bring us into notoriety;
ravished whenever we are fortunate enough to humiliate other women, we
would make the whole world witness of the preferences we encounter,
and the homage bestowed upon us. Do you know the measure of our
satisfaction in such cases? The despair of our rivals, the
indiscretions that betray the sentiments we inspire, this enchants us
proportionately to the misery they suffer. Similar imprudences
persuade us much more that we are loved, than that our charms are
incapable of giving us a reputation.

But what bitterness poisons such sweet pleasures! Beside so many
advantages marches the malignity of rival competitors, and sometimes
your disdain. A fatality which is mournful. The world makes no
distinction between women who permit you to love them, and those whom
you compensate for so doing. Uninfluenced, and sober-minded, a
reasonable woman always prefers a good reputation to celebrity. Put
her beside her rivals who contest with her the prize for beauty, and
though she may lose that reputation of which she appears so jealous,
though she compromise herself a thousand times, nothing is equal in
her opinion to see herself preferred to others. By and by, she will
recompense you by preferences; she will at first fancy that she grants
them out of gratitude, but they will be proofs of her attachment. In
her fear of appearing ungrateful, she becomes tender.

Can you not draw from this that it is not your indiscretions which vex
us? If they wound us, we must pay tribute to appearances, and you
would be the first to censure an excessive indulgence.