sentiment and breaks the vertebræ of character in such a way as to make impossible the development of any sincere and ardent affection. The most indefatigable coquettes and the most worn-out flirts never love; and if, in questions of love, not falling means to be virtuous, then coquetry can be said to be most pure and most holy. Every day the moral sense rebels at seeing many women selling smiles and desires every hour and, posing as Lucretias, impunely playing with lasciviousness which they do not feel, and with love which does not burn them, while they hurl anathemas at the woman who may, perhaps, have fallen but once, torn, as it were, by a true and strong passion, guilty of no other wrong than believing mendacity and treachery impossible. The virtue of the coquette is like that of the asbestos, which resists the fire by its fire-proof nature; it is a virtue entirely physical, anatomical, and he who values it does not possess a shadow of moral sense, nor has he even read a page of the physiology of the human heart. Readers, if you have the misfortune of loving a coquettish woman, never forget that coquetry belongs to the history of the lust of sentiment; and if you thirst for love, go and seek it elsewhere, for you have taken the wrong road to it. Where you are, do seek play and folly, pyrotechnics, acrobatism, the tintinnabulation of the fool's bells, the laughter of the masquerader; but do not seek ardent voluptuousness, or the sublime palpitations of an affection which never was the companion of coquetry. True love, which does not seek voluptuousness only, but the full, absolute, complete possession of all the beloved, cannot bring into play the subtle arts of the diplomacy of coquetry, because it cannot have the patience to study them, or the calmness to learn them. It is a genius that knows not how to adapt itself to the domestic cares of the home life; a general who knows how to win battles, but does not waste any attention on the buttons of the uniforms and on barrack regulations. Love shines, thunders, weeps, fulminates, threatens and prays; overthrown, it overthrows; wounded, it kills. It curses and blesses, but is wrong in one thing only: it does not know the game of chess. Coquetry, on the contrary, is the most famous chess-player ever known.