Note 10 — Chapter XXVI · OF MODESTY
Cecil N. Sidney Woolf translation
It is the story of the melancholy temperament and the sanguine. Consider a virtuous woman (even the mercenary virtue of certain of the faithful—virtue to be had for a hundredfold reward in Paradise) and a blasé debauchee of forty. Although the Valmont(13) of the Liaisons Dangereuses is not as far gone as that, the Présidente de Tourvel(13) is happier than he all the way through the book: and if the author, with all his wit, had had still more, that would have been the moral of his ingenious novel.