are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser
before your time. Your Louis will be happy, I daresay. If he loves
you, of which I make no doubt, he will never find out, that, for the
sake of your family, you are acting as a courtesan does for money; and
certainly men seem to find happiness with them, judging by the
fortunes they squander thus. A keen-sighted husband might no doubt
remain in love with you, but what sort of gratitude could he feel in
the long run for a woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral
armor, as indispensable as her stays?

Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues,
conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it
is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us. I cannot but
think you have been trying to justify in your own eyes the frightful
position of a girl, married to a man for whom she feels nothing more
than esteem. You prate of duty, and make it your rule and measure; but
surely to take necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory
of atheism? To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret
law of every woman's heart. You are acting a man's part, and your
Louis will have to play the woman!

Oh! my dear, your letter has plunged me into an endless train of
thought. I see now that the convent can never take the place of mother
to a girl. I beg of you, my grand angel with the black eyes, so pure
and proud, so serious and so pretty, do not turn away from these
cries, which the first reading of your letter has torn from me! I have
taken comfort in the thought that, while I was lamenting, love was
doubtless busy knocking down the scaffolding of reason.