I agree with you that you would lose too much if men and women were to show themselves in their true colors. The world has agreed to play a comedy, and to show real, natural sentiments would not be acting, it would be substituting the real character for the one it has been agreed to feign. Let us then enjoy the enchantment without seeking to know the cause of the charm which amuses and seduces us. To anatomize love would be to enter upon its cure. Psyche lost it for having been too curious, and I am tempted to believe that this fable is a lesson for those who wish to analyze pleasure.
I wish to make some corrections in what I have said to you: If I told you that men are wrong in priding themselves on their choice of a woman, and their sentiments for her; if I said that the motives which actuate them are nothing less than glorious for the men, I desire to add, that they are equally deceived if they imagine that the sentiments which they show with so much pompous display are always created by force of female charms, or by an abiding impression of their merits. How often does it happen that those men who make advances with such a respectful air, who display such delicate and refined sentiments, so flattering to vanity, who, in a word, seem to breathe only through them, only for them, and have no other desire than their happiness; how often, I repeat, are those men, who adorn themselves with such beautiful sentiments, influenced by reasons entirely the contrary? Study, penetrate these good souls, and you will see in the heart of this one, instead of a love so disinterested, only desire; in that one, it will be only a scheme to share your fortune, the glory of having obtained a woman of your rank; in a third you will discover motives still more humiliating to you; he will use you to rouse the jealousy of some woman he really loves, and he will cultivate your friendship merely to distinguish himself in her eyes by rejecting you. I can not tell you how many motives, there are so many. The human heart is an insolvable enigma. It is a whimsical combination of all the known contrarieties. We think we know its workings; we see their effects; we ignore the cause. If it expresses its sentiments sincerely, even that sincerity is not reassuring. Perhaps its movements spring from causes entirely contrary to those we imagine we feel to be the real ones. But, after all, people have adopted the best plan, that is, to explain everything to their advantage, and to compensate themselves in imagination for their real miseries, and accustom themselves, as I think I have already said, to deifying all their sentiments. Inasmuch as everybody finds in that the summit of his vanity, nobody has ever thought of reforming the custom, or of examining it to see whether it is a mistake.