4. To the lover, modesty offers very flattering pleasures; it makes him feel what laws are broken for his sake. 5. And to women it offers more intoxicating pleasures, which, causing the fall of a strongly established habit, throw the soul into greater confusion. The Comte de Valmont finds himself in a pretty woman's bedroom at [Pg 87] midnight. The thing happens every week to him; to her perhaps every other year. Thus continence and modesty must have pleasures infinitely more lively in store for women.[10] 6. The drawback of modesty is that it is always leading to falsehood. 7. Excess of modesty, and its severity, discourages gentle and timid hearts from loving[11]--just those made for giving and feeling the sweets of love. 8. In sensitive women, who have not had several lovers, modesty is a bar to ease of manner, and for this reason they are rather apt to let themselves be led by those friends, who need reproach themselves with no such failing.[12] They go into each particular case, instead of falling back blindly on habit. Delicacy and modesty give their actions a touch of restraint; by being natural they make [Pg 88] themselves appear unnatural; but this awkwardness is akin to heavenly grace. If familiarity in them sometimes resembles tenderness, it is because these angelic souls are coquettes without knowing it. They are disinclined to interrupt their dreams, and, to save themselves the trouble of speaking and finding something both pleasant and polite to say to a friend (which would end in being nothing but polite), they finish by leaning tenderly on his arm.[13] 9. Women only dare be frank by halves; which is the reason why they very rarely reach the highest, when they become authors, but which also gives a grace to their shortest note. For them to be frank means going out without a _fichu_. For a man nothing more frequent than to write absolutely at the dictate of his imagination, without knowing where he is going. _Résumé_ The usual fault is to treat woman as a kind of man, but more generous, more changeable and with whom, above all, no rivalry is possible. It is only too easy to forget that there are two new and peculiar laws, which tyrannise over these unstable beings, in conflict with all the ordinary impulses of human nature--I mean:-- Feminine pride and modesty, and those often inscrutable habits born of modesty. [1] See the Travels of Bougainville, Cook, etc. In some animals, the female seems to retract at the moment she gives herself. We must expect from comparative anatomy some of the most important revelations about ourselves. [2] Shows one's love in a new way. [3] See the admirable picture of these tedious manners at the end of _Corinne_; and Madame de Staël has made a flattering portrait. [4] The Bible and Aristocracy take a cruel revenge upon people who believe that duty is everything.