assured that she hesitated from motives quite independent of love and virtue; nay, that their apparent struggles were but her own secret deliberations. I was constantly alone with her; and my delicacy could not long resist the temptation. She imposed on me all the duties, in yielding me all the rights of a husband; yet displayed more remorse, perhaps, than she really felt; and thus so bound me to her, that I would fain have taken her to England, and implored my father's consent to our union; but she refused to quit France, unless as my wife. There she was wise, indeed; but, well knowing my filial resolutions, she erred in the means she used to retain me in spite mine every duty. When the war broke out, my desire to leave France became stronger, and her obstacles to it multiplied. She could obtain no passport; and if I went alone, her reputation would be ruined; nay, she should be doubly suspected, for her correspondence with me. This woman, so mild, so equable, in general, then gave way to a despair which perfectly overwhelmed me. She employed her wit and graces to please, her grief to intimidate me. Perhaps women are wrong in commanding by tears, enslaving by the strength of their weakness; yet, when they fear not to exert this weapon, it is nearly always victorious, at least for awhile. Doubtless, love is weakened by this sort of usurpation; and the power of tears, too frequently exerted, chills the imagination; but, at that time, there were a thousand excuses for them in France. Madame d'Arbigny's health, too, seemed daily to decrease: another terrible instrument of female tyranny is illness. Those who have not, like you, Corinne, a just reliance on their minds, or are not, like Englishwomen, so proudly modest that feigning is impossible, have always recourse to art; and the best we can then hope of them is that their deceit is caused by a real attachment. A third party was now blended with our connection,[2] Monsieur Maltigues. She pleased him; he asked nothing better than to marry her; though a speculative immorality rendered him indifferent to everything. He loved intrigue as a game, even while not interested in the stake; and seconded Madame d'Arbigny's designs on me, ready to desert this plot if occasion served for accomplishing his own. He was a man against whom I felt a singular repugnance; though scarcely thirty, his manners and person were remarkably hackneyed. In England, where we are accused of coldness, I never met anything comparable with the seriousness of his demeanor on entering a room. I should never have taken him for a Frenchman, if he had not possessed some taste and pleasantry, with a love of talking very extraordinary in a man who seemed sated of the world, and who carried that disposition to a system. He pretended that he was born a sensitive enthusiast, but that the knowledge of mankind he owed to the revolution had undeceived him. He perceived, he said, that there was nothing good