I stayed close by my mother, who gave me her arm with well-rewarded devotion. All the homages were for her, I was a pretext for the most pleasant flatteries. She showed a rare gift for pairing me with imbecilic dance partners who spoke to me of the warmth as if I were freezing and of the beauty of the ball as if I were blind. Not one failed to fall into ecstasies over a strange, incredible, extraordinary, singular, bizarre thing, which was seeing me at the ball for the first time. My dress, which so thrilled me as I paraded alone through my white-and-gold drawing room, was scarcely noticeable among the splendid gowns on most of the women. They all had their faithful admirers, they all watched one another out of the corners of their eyes, several of them stood out by their triumphant beauty, my mother among them. A young woman counts for nothing at the ball: she is a dancing machine. With a few rare exceptions, the men are no better than on the Champs-Élysées. They are worn, their faces have no character, or rather they all have the same character. The proud, vigorous faces we see in our ancestors’ portraits, wedding physical vitality to force of mind, those faces no longer exist. But there was one man of great talent in that assembly, a man who stood out in the crowd by the fineness of his face; nonetheless, he did not move me in the least. I know nothing of his work, and he is not of the true nobility. However brilliant or fine a commoner or newly minted noble[12] may be, I do not have a single drop of blood in my veins for him. Not to mention that I found him so deeply occupied with himself and so little with others that I concluded that we women must be mere things, and not people, for such great adventurers of the mind. When a man of talent is in love, he must no longer write, or else he is not in love. There is something in his mind that comes before his mistress. I thought I could see all that in this man’s demeanor, he who is, I am told, a teacher, a talker, an author, whose ambition makes him a servant of any power. I made my decision then and there: I thought it most unworthy of me to blame the world around me for my lack of success, and I began to dance without troubling myself about such things. I very much liked dancing, as it happens. I heard a great deal of dull gossip about people I didn’t know, but perhaps I simply still have much to learn, for I saw most of the men and women taking a very keen pleasure in saying or hearing one thing or another. Society offers a host of enigmas whose solution seems very difficult to find. The mysteries proliferate. My eyes are keen enough, and my ear sharp; as for the quickness of my mind, you know it well, Mademoiselle de Maucombe!

I came home tired, and glad of that tiredness. I very naively told my mother of my state, and she advised me to say such things only to her. “My dear girl,” she added, “good taste means knowing what mustn’t be said as much as what may be.”

On hearing that counsel, I conceived an idea of all the feelings we must tell no one of, perhaps not even our own mother. With one glance I surveyed the whole vast realm of feminine dissimulations. I can assure you, my dear doe, that with the effrontery of our innocence we would seem two very bold little misses here. How much there is to learn from a finger pressed to the lips, from a word, from a glance! All at once I was greatly intimated. So I must say nothing of the very natural happiness caused by the movements of the dance? What, then, I wondered, of our sentiments? I went to bed dispirited. I am still reeling from the shock of my open, lighthearted nature’s first collision with society’s hard laws.