M. Tavel, her first lover, was also her instructor in this philosophy,
and the principles he instilled into her mind were such as tended to
seduce her. Finding her cold and impregnable on the side of her
passions, and firmly attached to her husband and her duty, he attacked
her by sophisms, endeavoring to prove that the list of duties she thought
so sacred, was but a sort of catechism, fit only for children. That the
kind of infidelity she thought so terrible, was, in itself, absolutely
indifferent; that all the morality of conjugal faith consisted in
opinion, the contentment of husbands being the only reasonable rule of
duty in wives; consequently that concealed infidelities, doing no injury,
could be no crime; in a word, he persuaded her that the sin consisted
only in the scandal, that woman being really virtuous who took care to
appear so. Thus the deceiver obtained his end in the subverting the
reason of a girl; whose heart he found it impossible to corrupt, and
received his punishment in a devouring jealousy, being persuaded she
would treat him as he had prevailed on her to treat her husband.

I don't know whether he was mistaken in this respect: the Minister Perret
passed for his successor; all I know, is, that the coldness of
temperament which it might have been supposed would have kept her from
embracing this system, in the end prevented her from renouncing it. She
could not conceive how so much importance should be given to what seemed
to have none for her; nor could she honor with the name of virtue, an
abstinence which would have cost her little.

She did not, therefore, give in to this false principle on her own
account, but for the sake of others; and that from another maxim almost
as false as the former, but more consonant to the generosity of her
disposition.