The Girl With the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Mandell

taking excessive care of yourself imply that you’re looking after the good of the other person in yourself? The man who doesn’t belong to himself is precisely the man women are fond of. Love is essentially a thief. I’m not talking about that excess of cleanliness they’re crazy about. Have you ever found a woman who was passionately in love with a slovenly person, even one who was a remarkable man? If ever such a thing occurred, we’d have to attribute it to the whims of a pregnant woman, those weird ideas that come into her head and are told to everyone without a second thought. On the contrary, I have seen remarkable people quite simply dropped because of their negligence. A vain man who takes care of his appearance is one who takes care of a foolish thing, mere trifles. And what is woman? A mere trifle, an ensemble of foolish things. With two words spoken into the air, can’t we make her work for four hours? She is certain thevain man will take care of her, since he doesn’t think about big things. She will never play second fiddle to fame, ambition, politics, art, those big public girls who she thinks of as her rivals. Further, vain men have the courage to cover themselves with ridicule to please a woman, and her heart is full of consideration for a man who is made ridiculous by love. Finally, a conceited man can only be conceited if he has some reason to be so. Women are the ones who give us this rank. The conceited man is the colonel of love, he has affairs, he has his regiment of women to command! My dear friend! In Paris, everything is known, and a man cannot be conceited here
gratis
. You who have only one woman and who may have reason to have only one, if you tried to seem full of yourself, you’d not only become ridiculous, you’d be dead. You’d become a walking caricature, one of those men inevitably condemned to do one single thing. You would signify
foolishness
the way M. de Lafayette signifies America; M. de Talleyrand, diplomacy; Désaugiers, song; M. de Ségur, romance. If they depart from their specialty, everyone stops believing in the value of what they do. That’s what we’re like in France, always supremely unfair! M. de Talleyrand might be a great financier, M. de Lafayette a tyrant, and Désaugiers an administrator. You could have forty women the following year, but publicly theywouldn’t credit you with even one. Thus conceit, my friend Paul, is the sign of an unquestionable power acquired over the female population. A man loved by many women passes for having superior qualities; and then he can have whomever he likes, the wretch! But do you think it’s nothing to have the right to come into a salon, survey everyone there from over your cravat or through a monocle, and be able to scorn the most superior man there if he’s wearing an outdated waistcoat? Laurent, you’re hurting me! After lunch, Paul, we’ll go to the Tuileries to see the adorable Girl with the Golden Eyes.”
    When, after an excellent meal, the two young men had paced up and down the Feuillants terrace and the wide lane in the Tuileries, they didn’t meet the sublime Paquita Valdès anywhere, on whose account fifty of the most elegant young men in Paris were there, all perfumed with musk, wearing cravats, boots, spurs, using their riding crops, walking, talking, laughing, telling everyone to go to the devil.
    “Bullseye!” Henri said, “the most excellent idea in the world has just come to me. This girl gets letters from London, so we have to buy or bribe the mailman, open a letter, read it of course, then slip a little
billet doux
into it, and seal it back up. The old tyrant,
crudel tiranno
, must know the person who writes the letters that come from London, and doesn’t distrust them.”
    The next day, de Marsay came again to stroll in the sun on the Feuillants terrace, and saw Paquita Valdès there: Already passion had made her grow even more beautiful to him. He completely lost his head over those eyes