or, and the tiresome
monotony which is called "good disposition."

I know how you men must be governed. A caprice puts you in an
uncertainty, which you have as much trouble and grief in dispelling as
though it were a victory obtained over a new object. Roughness makes
you hold your breath. You do not stop disputing, but neither do you
cease to conquer and to be conquered. In vain does reason sigh. You
can not comprehend how such an imp manages to subjugate you so
tyrannically. Everything tells you that the idol of your heart is a
collection of caprices and follies, but she is a spoiled child, whom
you can not help but love. The efforts which reflection causes you to
make to loosen them, serve only to forge still tighter your chains;
for love is never so strong as when you believe it ready to break away
in the heat of a quarrel. It loves, it storms; with it, everything is
convulsive. Would you reduce it to rule? It languishes, it expires. In
a word, this is what I wanted to say; do not take for a mistress a
woman who has only reliable qualities; but one who is sometimes
dominated by temper, and silences reason; otherwise I shall say that
it is not a love affair you want, but to set up housekeeping.

V

Love and Temper

Oh, I agree with you, Marquis, a woman who has only temper and
caprices is very thorny for an acquaintance and in the end only
repels. I agree again that these irregularities must make of love a
never ending quarrel, a continual storm. Therefore, it is not for a
person of this character that I advise you to form an attachment. You
always go beyond my ideas. I only depicted to you in my last letter an
amiable woman, one who becomes still more so by a shade of diversity,
and you speak only of an unpleasant woman, who has nothing but
ungracious things to say. How we have drifted away from the point!

When I spoke of temper I only meant the kind which gives a stronger
relish, anxiety, and a little jealousy: that, in a word, which springs
from love alone, and not from natural brutality, that roughness which
one ordinarily calls "bad temper." When it is love which makes a woman
rough, when that alone is the cause of her liveliness, what sort can
the lover be who has so little delicacy as to complain of it? Do not
these errors prove the violence of passion? For myself, I have always
thought that he who knew how to keep himself within proper bounds,
was moderately amorous. Can one be so, in effect, w