It is not because you possess superior qualities that you are a pleasant companion, it may be a real defect which is essential to you.  To be received with open arms, you must be agreeable, amusing, necessary to the pleasure of others.  I warn you that you can not succeed in any other manner, particularly with women.  Tell me, what would you have me do with your learning, the geometry of your mind, 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?

Now, this is my conclusion:  If it be true, as you can not doubt, that you ought not to expect happiness except from an interchange of agreeable qualities in women, you may be sure that you will never please them unless you possess advantages similar to theirs.  I stick to the point.  You men are constantly boasting about your science, your firmness, etc., but tell me, how weary would you not be, how disgusted even, with life, if, always logical, you were condemned to be forever learned and sordid, to live only in the company of philosophers?  I know you, you would soon become weary of admiration for your good qualities, and the way you are made, you would rather do without virtue than pleasure.  Do not amuse yourself, then, by holding yourself out as a man with great qualities in the sense you consider them.  True merit is that which is esteemed by those we aim to please.  Gallantry has its own laws, and Marquis, amiable men are the sages of this world.