I beg for pardon if I often come back to Italy; in the present state of manners in Europe, it is the only country where the plant, which I describe, grows in all freedom. In France, vanity; in Germany, a pretentious and highly comical philosophy; in England, pride, timid, painful and rancorous, torture and stifle it, or force it into a crooked channel.[3] [1] See Cabanis, influence of the physical, etc. [2] The laces missing from Minister Roland's shoes: "Ah, Monsieur, all is lost," answers Dumouriez. At the royal sitting, the President of the Assembly crosses his legs. [3] The reader will have perceived only too easily that this treatise is made up of Lisio's Visconti's fragmentary account of events, written in the order that they were presented to him on his travels. All these events may be found related at length in the journal of his life; perhaps I ought to have inserted them--but they might have been found scarcely suitable. The oldest notes bear the date, Berlin 1807, and the last are some days before his death, June 1819. Some dates have been altered expressly to avoid indiscretion; but the changes, which I have made, go no further than that. I have not thought myself authorised to recast the style. This book was written in a hundred different places--so may it be read! [Pg 158] CHAPTER XLI OF NATIONS WITH REGARD TO LOVE. FRANCE I mean to put aside my natural affections and be only a cold philosopher. French women, fashioned by their amiable men, themselves creatures only of vanity and physical desires, are less active, less energetic, less feared, and, what's more, less loved and less powerful, than Spanish and Italian women. A woman is powerful only according to the degree of unhappiness, which she can inflict as punishment on her lover. Where men have nothing but vanity, every woman is useful, but none is indispensable. It is success in winning a woman's love, not in keeping it, which flatters a man. When men have only physical desires, they go to prostitutes, and that is why the prostitutes of France are charming and those of Spain the very reverse. In France, to a great many men prostitutes can give as much happiness as virtuous women--happiness, that is to say, without love. There is always one thing for which a Frenchman has much more respect than for his mistress--his vanity. In Paris a young man sees in his mistress a kind of slave, whose destiny it is, before everything, to please his vanity. If she resist the orders of this dominating passion, he leaves her--and is only the better pleased with himself, when he can tell his friends in what a piquant way, with how smart a gesture, he waved her off. A Frenchman, who knew his own country well (Meilhan), said: "In France, great passions are as rare as great men."