Between ourselves, you are a clever woman.

Des Lupeaulx served to bring you into this house, and that is all you wanted of him, isn't it?
Now when a woman decides to love a man for what she can get out of him it is better to take a sexagenarian Excellency than a quadragenarian secretary; there's more profit and less annoyance.

I'm a man with spectacles, grizzled hair, worn out with dissipation,--a fine lover, truly! I tell myself all this again and again.

It must be admitted, of course, that I can sometimes be useful, but never agreeable.

Isn't that so?
A man must be a fool if he cannot reason about himself.