In what does Rosette fall short of being that woman? In this, that I do not believe she is. By what fatality do I always have for mistresses, women that I do not love? Her neck is smooth enough to set off the most beautifully-wrought necklaces; her fingers are taper enough to do honor to the loveliest and richest rings; the ruby would blush with pleasure to gleam on the pink lobe of her delicate ear; the cestus of Venus would fit her waist; but Love alone has the secret of tying his mother's scarf. All Rosette's merit is in herself, I have attributed nothing to her that she has not. I have not cast over her beauty the veil of perfection with which love envelops the loved one;--the veil of Isis is transparent beside that veil. Naught but satiety can raise the corner of it. I do not love Rosette; at least my love for her, if I have any, does not resemble the ideal I have formed of love. It may be that my ideal is not a just one, I do not dare to say. Certain it is that it makes me insensible to the merits of other women, and I have desired no other with any consistency since I have had her. If she has any reason to be jealous, it is of phantoms only, about which she worries very little, and yet her most formidable rival is my imagination; that is something which, with all her shrewdness, she will probably never discover. If women only knew!--How many infidelities the least fickle lover is guilty of to the most adored mistress!--It is to be presumed that they pay us back in full and more; but they do as we do and say nothing. A mistress is a necessary subject, who ordinarily disappears under flourishes and embroidery. Very often the kisses you give her are not for her; you embrace the idea of another woman in her person, and she profits not infrequently--if it can be called profiting--by the desires aroused by another. Ah! my poor Rosette, how many times you have served as a body to my dreams and given reality to your rivals; to how many infidelities have you unwittingly been accessory! If you could have imagined, at times when my arms clasped you so tightly, when my mouth was most closely united to yours, that your beauty and your love had nothing to do with my passion, that the thought of you was a hundred leagues from my mind; what if some one had told you that those eyes, veiled with amorous languor, were cast down simply in order not to look at you and not to banish the illusion that you served only to complete, and that, instead of being a mistress, you were simply an instrument of lust, a means of assuaging a desire impossible of realization!