At last, after so many uncertainties, after so many revolutions in your imagination, you are sure you are loved?  You have finally succeeded in exciting the Countess to divulge her secret during a moment of tenderness.  The words you burned to hear have been pronounced.  More, she has allowed to escape her, a thousand involuntary proofs of the passion you have inspired.  Far from diminishing your love, the certainty that you are beloved in return has increased it; in a word, you are the happiest of men.  If you knew with how much pleasure I share your happiness you would be still happier.  The first sacrifice she desired to make was to refuse to receive the Chevalier:  you were opposed to her making it, and you were quite right.  It would have compromised the Countess for nothing, which calls to my mind the fact, that women generally lose more by imprudence than by actual faults.  The confidence you so nobly manifested in her, ought to have greatly impressed her.

Everything is now as it should be.  However, shall I tell you something?  The way this matter has turned out alarms me.  We agreed, if you remember, that we were to treat the subject of love without gloves.  You were not to have at the most but a light and fleeting taste of it, and not a regulated passion.  Now I perceive that things become more serious every day.  You are beginning to treat love with a dignity which worries me.  The knowledge of true merits, solid qualities, and good character is creeping into the motives of your liaison, and combining with the personal charms which render you so blindly amorous.  I do not like to have so much esteem mixed with an affair of pure gallantry.  It leaves no freedom of action, it is work instead of amusement.  I was afraid in the beginning that your relations would assume a grave and measured turn.  But perhaps you will only too soon have new pretensions, and the Countess by new disputes will doubtless re-animate your liaison.  Too constant a peace is productive of a deadly ennui.  Uniformity kills love, for as soon as the spirit of method mingles in an affair of the heart, the passion disappears, languor supervenes, weariness begins to wear, and disgust ends the chapter.

XXVII

The Heart Needs Constant Employment

Madame de Sevigne does not agree with me upon the causes of love as I give them.  She pretends that many women know it only from its refined side, and that the senses never count for anything in their heart affairs.  According to her, although what she calls my “system” should be well founded, it would always be unbecoming in the mouth of a woman, and might become a precedent in morals.