But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what every pure young girl should be,--a good woman, the virtuous mother of a family. A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound a woman’s proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels, to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl. Hear the whole truth,--do I not owe it to you in return for your intoxicating flattery? If it is a glorious thing to marry a great renown, remember also that you must soon discover a superior man to be, in all that makes a man, like other men. He therefore poorly realizes the hopes that attach to him as a phoenix. He becomes like a woman whose beauty is over-praised, and of whom we say: “I thought her far more lovely.” She has not warranted the portrait painted by the fairy to whom I owe your letter,--the fairy whose name is Imagination. Believe me, the qualities of the mind live and thrive only in a sphere invisible, not in daily life; the wife of a poet bears the burden; she sees the jewels manufactured, but she never wears them. If the glory of the position fascinates you, hear me now when I tell you that its pleasures are soon at an end. You will suffer when you find so many asperities in a nature which, from a distance, you thought equable, and such coldness at the shining summit. Moreover, as women never set their feet within the world of real difficulties, they cease to appreciate what they once admired as soon as they think they see the inner mechanism of it. I close with a last thought, in which there is no disguised entreaty; it is the counsel of a friend. The exchange of souls can take place only between persons who are resolved to hide nothing from each other. Would you show yourself for such as you are to an unknown man? I dare not follow out the consequences of that idea. Deign to accept, mademoiselle, the homage which we owe to all women, even those who are disguised and masked.