Always doubt a sudden impression, so called a _coup de foudre_, if it has seized you after long abstinence from woman’s society. ⁂ For love also, and perhaps more for love than for the brain, it is prudent to remember the fasting Philip. ⁂ If you fear being enamoured of a young girl and are not disposed toward marriage, go and see all the married and young ladies most famed for beauty, grace, and elegance, and make your comparisons. If they be unfavourable to her, doubt directly the seriousness and depth of your passion. This has to do only with what we call physical love, but I speak of it at some length as it is the first door opened when a man and woman see each other for the first time. But I do not mean that it is the only one which leads you to the fatal _yes_. It ought only to give you an entrance into the ante-chamber where you must wait patiently until heart and mind open the doors of the inner rooms, where you will have to live all your life. If there has been no _coup de foudre_, but the sympathy came gradually, developed and grew until it became a real passion, then all my counsels of examination and experiment will be perfectly useless. At each visit you unconsciously, and without thinking of it at all, correct or confirm the first impression—now trimming, now increasing the warmth of the original sympathy. How many wooings, how many marriages have miscarried in our fancy without our knowing a word of it, or even having spoken an affectionate word to the person who awakened so sudden and strong an impression in us! A being suddenly appeared on the horizon, perhaps in an hour in which we felt the weight of solitude, the tortures of abstinence, and we said to ourselves directly: What a charming and sweet creature! Why do I not take her for mine ... and forever? The apparition passed from our gaze, but we carried it home with us carved, or rather written, on our minds in fire. We saw her between the lines of the book we read, in our dreams, everywhere. A few days later we see her in the street, or in society, and we vainly endeavor to reconcile the reality with the figure we saw in our imagination. The discord is complete. The woman is not the same, and smiling to ourselves over the love which we had dreamt of in the silence of our minds, we exclaim, “How could I ever have admired this vulgar, ugly, faded creature and wished to have her for my own!” It is well, indeed, when the sketch can be corrected so soon; unfortunately it sometimes occurs after several visits, when we may have compromised our heart and perhaps our word. Prudence, then, _adelante Pedro con juicio!_ ⁂