[LETTER CXXV.]
VISCOUNT DE VALMONT to the MARCHIONESS DE MERTEUIL.
At last this haughty woman is conquered, who dared think she could resist me.—She is mine—totally mine.—She has nothing left to grant since yesterday.
My happiness is so great I cannot appreciate it, but am astonished at the unknown charm I feel:—Is it possible virtue can augment a woman’s value even at the time of her weakness?—Avaunt such puerile ideas—don’t we every day meet resistance more or less feigned at the first conquest? Yet I never experienced the charm I mean; it is not love—for although I have had fits of weakness with this amazing woman, which very much resembled that pusillanimous passion, I ever subdued them and returned to my first rules—if even the scene of yesterday should have led me farther than I intended; had I partook for a moment of the intoxication I raised, that transitory illusion would have been now evaporated, yet still the same charm remains—I own I should be pleased to indulge it, if it did not give me some uneasiness:—At my age must I then be mastered like a school-boy by an unknown and involuntary sentiment?—I must first oppose and then examine it.
Perhaps I already see into the cause—the idea pleases me—I wish it may be true.
Among the multitude of women with whom I have played the part of a lover, I never met any who were not as well inclined to surrender as I was to persuade them—I used even to call those prudes who met me but halfway, in contrast to so many others, whose provoking defence is intended as a cloak to their first advances.
But here I found an unfavourable prepossession against me, afterwards confirmed on the report and advice of a penetrating woman who hated me; a natural, excessive timidity, fortified with genuine modesty; a strong attachment to virtue under the powerful direction of religion, and who had already been married two years—an unsullied character—the result of those causes, which all tended to screen her from my solicitations.