She wrote him a fervent letter, which Sophie delivered, telling him that it was not her will that he was forbidden the house. She saw that he had a card for the Mass celebrating her mother’s death. She idealized him in a manner worthy of Julie herself, without knowing anything in particular of him, and without his ever having made her any declaration. A sentimental young woman rarely conceives her lover as he is. Certainly the actual La Blancherie was a very different young man from the paragon of stern virtue Mademoiselle Phlipon pictured, and when the creation of her imagination was brought face to face, one day in the Luxembourg, with the flesh and blood original, the latter made a poor showing. To begin with, he had a feather in his cap, a common enough thing in that day—“Ah, you would not believe how this cursed plume has tormented me,” she wrote Sophie. “I have tried in every way to reconcile this frivolous ornament with that philosophy, with that taste for the simple, with that manner of thinking which made D. L. B. [it is thus that she designates La Blancherie in her letters] so dear to me.” But she did not succeed. No doubt her inability to forgive the feather was made greater by a bit of gossip repeated to her the same day by a friend who was walking with her, that La Blancherie had been forbidden the house of one of her friends because he had boasted that he was going to marry one of the daughters, and that he was commonly known among their friends as “the lover of the eleven thousand virgins.” Her cure was rapid after this, and when, a few months later, La Blancherie succeeded in getting an interview with her and represented his misfortunes and his hopes, she listened calmly, and told him, at length, that after having distinguished him from the ordinary young man, and indeed placed him far higher, she had been obliged to replace him among the large class of average mortals. For some four hours they debated the situation, and at last La Blancherie withdrew. Manon’s first love affair was over, and she sat down with rare complacency to describe the finale to Sophie. She had no self-reproach in the affair. As always, she was infallible.