ailings! if we can call by that name errors in which the senses had
so little share. The man who in one particular deceived her so
completely, had given her excellent instructions in a thousand others;
and her passions, being far from turbulent, permitted her to follow the
dictates. She ever acted wisely when her sophisms did not intervene, and
her designs were laudable even in her failings. False principles might
lead her to do ill, but she never did anything which she conceived to be
wrong. She abhorred lying and duplicity, was just, equitable, humane,
disinterested, true to her word, her friends, and those duties which she
conceived to be such; incapable of hatred or revenge, and not even
conceiving there was a merit in pardoning; in fine (to return to those
qualities which were less excusable), though she did not properly value,
she never made a vile commerce of her favors; she lavished, but never
sold them, though continually reduced to expedients for a subsistence:
and I dare assert, that if Socrates could esteem Aspasia, he would have
respected Madam de Warrens.

I am well aware that ascribing sensibility of heart with coldness of
temperament to the same person, I shall generally, and with great
appearance of reason, be accused of a contradiction. Perhaps Nature
sported or blundered, and this combination ought not to have existed;
I only know it did exist. All those who know Madam de Warrens (a great
number of whom are yet living) have had opportunities of knowing this was
a fact; I dare even aver she had but one pleasure in the world, which was
serving those she loved. Let every one argue on the point as he pleases,
and gravely prove that this cannot be; my business is to declare the
truth, and not to enforce a belief of it.

I became acquainted with the particulars I have just related, in those
conversations which succeeded our union, and alone rendered it delicious.
She was right when she concluded her complaisance would be useful to me;
I derived great advantages from it in point of useful instruction.
Hitherto she had used me as a child, she now began to treat me as a man,
and entertain me with accounts of herself. Everything she said was so
interesting, and I was so sensibly touched with it, that, reasoning with
myself, I applied these confidential relations to my own improvement and
received more instruction from them than from her teaching. When we
truly feel that the heart speaks, our own opens