Armand was dumb with amazement.

"Has your desire reached the point of infatuation?"

"I want her at any cost!" Montriveau cried out despairingly.

"Very well. Now, look here. Be as inexorable as she is
herself. Try to humiliate her, to sting her vanity. Do _not_ try
to move her heart, nor her soul, but the woman's nerves and
temperament, for she is both nervous and lymphatic. If you can
once awaken desire in her, you are safe. But you must drop these
romantic boyish notions of yours. If when once you have her in
your eagle's talons you yield a point or draw back, if you so
much as stir an eyelid, if she thinks that she can regain her
ascendancy over you, she will slip out of your clutches like a
fish, and you will never catch her again. Be as inflexible as
law. Show no more charity than the headsman. Hit hard, and then
hit again. Strike and keep on striking as if you were giving her
the knout. Duchesses are made of hard stuff, my dear Armand;
there is a sort of feminine nature that is only softened by
repeated blows; and as suffering develops a heart in women of
that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare the rod. Do
you persevere. Ah! when pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves
and softened the fibres that you take to be so pliant and
yielding; when a shriveled heart has learned to expand and
contract and to beat under this discipline; when the brain has
capitulated--then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel
springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations
and languors and melting phrases; then you shall see a most