"For your sake, Madame, because you have always been kind to me, and because it is impossible not to love you, I have degraded myself.

I have pretended to love a man who saw through the artifice and told me so, to save me further shame.

O Madame, it is all execrable! "And you will use this love which you have gained--this first love of a man who has known no other and will know no other while he lives!--to bring about his ruin?
This other, at whose head you threw me--beware of him.

He is light-hearted and gay, perhaps.

You call him a clown; he is cunning and brave; and unless you judge him at his true value, your fabric of schemes will fall ere it reaches its culmination.