It is quite impossible to put a stop to love except in its first stages. Besides a prompt departure, and the forced distractions of society (as in the case of the Comtesse Kalember), there are several other little ruses, which the _friend in need_ can bring into play. For example, he can bring to your notice, as if by chance, the fact that the woman you love, quite outside the disputed area, does not even observe towards you the same amount of politeness and respect, with which she honours your rival. The smallest details are enough; for in love everything is a sign. For example, she does not take your arm to go up to her box. This sort of nonsense, taken tragically by a passionate heart, couples a pang of humiliation to every judgment formed by crystallisation, poisons the source of love and may destroy it. One way against the woman, who is behaving badly to our friend, is to bring her under suspicion of some absurd physical defect, impossible to verify. If it were possible for the lover to verify the calumny, and even if he found it substantiated, it would be disqualified by his imagination, and soon have no place with him at all. It is only imagination itself which can resist imagination: Henry III knew that very well when he scoffed at the famous Duchesse de Montpensier(22). Hence it is the imagination you must look to--above all, in a girl whom you want to keep safe from love. And the less her spirit has of the common stuff, the more noble and generous her soul, in a word the worthier she is of our respect, just so much greater the danger through which she must pass. It is always perilous, for a girl, to suffer her memories to group themselves too repeatedly and too agreeably round the same individual. Add gratitude, admiration or curiosity to strengthen the bonds of memory, and she is almost certainly on the edge of the [Pg 151] precipice. The greater the monotony of her everyday life, the more active are those poisons called gratitude, admiration and curiosity. The only thing, then, is a swift, prompt and vigorous distraction. Just so, a little roughness and "slap-dash" in the first encounter, is an almost infallible means of winning the respect of a clever woman, if only the drug be administered in a natural and simple manner. [Pg 152] [Pg 153] BOOK II [Pg 154] [Pg 155] CHAPTER XL Every kind of love and every kind of imagination, in the individual, takes its colour from one of these six temperaments:-- The sanguine, or French,--M. de Francueil (Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay); The choleric, or Spanish,--Lauzun (the Peguilhen of Saint-Simon's Memoirs); The melancholy, or German,--Schiller's Don Carlos; The phlegmatic, or Dutch; The nervous--Voltaire; The athletic--Milo of Croton.[1]