are one million of hearts worthy of paying homage to honest women.
This number approximately includes those who are superior in all
departments. Women love only the intellectual, but justice must be
done to virtue.

As for these amiable celibates, each of them relates a string of
adventures, all of which seriously compromise honest women. It would
be a very moderate and reserved computation to attribute no more than
three adventures to each celibate; but if some of them count their
adventures by the dozen, there are many more who confine themselves to
two or three incidents of passion and some to a single one in their
whole life, so that we have in accordance with the statistical method
taken the average. Now if the number of celibates be multiplied by the
number of their excesses in love the result will be three millions of
adventures; to set against this we have only four hundred thousand
honest women!

If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does
not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because
so little success attended the first.

Here then we have a people, a society which has been sifted, and you
see the result!

XVI.
Manners are the hypocrisy of nations, and hypocrisy is more or less
perfect.

XVII.
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all
the time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so
regular as at the table.

A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of any
man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of
gastronomy.

Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving,
that science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the
French alone possess, for that science originated in this country.

Well, after all, isn't it enough to enrage all husbands when they
think that man is so endowed with an innate desire to change from one
food to another, that in some savage countries, where travelers have
landed, they have found alcoholic drinks and ragouts?

Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are
more numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than
the caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences
of our own life have revealed to