A pretty woman is always dangerous when she comes to inaugurate the divinity of her charms in a lonely chateau, in the presence of two inflammable young men.  I detect the cunning of the fair unknown:  she lavishes innocent smiles upon both of you—­she equally divides her coquetries between you; she approaches you to dazzle—­she leaves you to make herself regretted; she entangles you in the illusion of her brilliant fascination; she moves to seduce your senses; she speaks to charm your soul; she sings to destroy your reason.

Forget yourself for one instant, my young friend, on this flowery slope, and woe betide you when you reach the bottom!  Be intoxicated by this feast of sweet words, soft perfumes and radiant smiles, then send me a report of your soul’s condition when you recover your senses!  At present, in spite of your skirmishes of wit, you are still the friend of Edgar ... hostility will certainly come.  Friendship is too feeble a sentiment to struggle against love.  This passion is more violent than tropical storms—­I have felt it—­I am one of its victims now!  There lives another woman—­half siren, half Circe—­who has crossed my path in life, as you well know.  If I had collected in my house as many friends as Socrates desired to see in his, and all these friends were to become my rivals, I feel that my jealousy would fire the house, and I would gladly perish in the flames after seeing them all dead before my eyes.

Oh, fatal preoccupation!  I only wished to speak of your affairs, and here I am talking of my own.  The clouds that I heap upon your horizon roll back towards mine.

In exchange for my advice, render me a service.  You know Madame de Braimes, the friend of Mlle. de Chateaudun.  Madame de Braimes is acquainted with everything that I am ignorant of, and that my happiness in life depends upon discovering.  It is time for the inexplicable to be explained.  A human enigma cannot for ever conceal its answer.  Every trial must end before the despair of him who is tried.  Madame de Braimes is an accomplice in this enigma; her secret now is a burden on her lips, she must let it fall into your ear, and I will cherish a life-long gratitude to you both.

Any friend but you would smile at this apparently strange language—­I write you a long chapter of psychological and moral inductions to show my knowledge about the management of love affairs and affairs otherwise—­I divine all your enigmas; I illuminate the darkness of all your mysteries, and when it comes to working on my own account, to be perspicacious for my own benefit, to make discoveries about my own love affair, I suddenly abdicate, I lose my luminous faculties, I put a band over my eyes, and humbly beg a friend to lend me the thread of the labyrinth and guide my steps in the bewildering darkness.  All this must appear singular to you, to me it is quite natural.  Through the thousand dark accidents that love scatters in the path of life, light can only reach us by means