When you climb a staircase, you pass closed doors and generally never consider that the keys are often under the mats. That little bit of metal that opens up access to apartments with rare furnishings and delicate chambers is right there where you usually scrape the mud off your feet.
In the same way, to earn the love of women you must know a little secret, a talisman, and that talisman is almost always lying under the dirty doormat.
The author of this book desired to lift all the mats on the stairs to see whether there were keys under them. He was surprised by the diversity of their forms; he had supposed that there was no passkey that could open all these doors, and, since he had dirtied his hands, he did not dare enter any apartment and went back down into the street, where he found himself all alone.
He wrote the following for only a certain type of young people.
Those whom nature has, by an agreeable gift, made tall and handsome, and who are endowed by an adventurous spirit with the self-confidence that these qualities inspire—why would they read observations and advice of which they have no need? For all women say that they place no value on physical beauty in a man and that only the mind and heart count for them—but it is not so. An immense genius does not compensate for blotchy skin or bleary eyes; handsome men triumph over the ugly as day triumphs over night.
At the same time, this book is not made for purely studious and speculative young men, destined for philosophy or the sciences, who place no value on love. They will be punished for their limited conception of life when they marry: for if such a man’s wife is pretty, she will deceive him; if she is ugly, he will have that ugliness before his eyes every single day.
Those who attempt an ecclesiastical career, businessmen who are always busy, strict magistrates, those who have a high position in government, and in general all those of hypocritical tendency and conventional morality must thrust this book far from them; it will seem unworthy to them, and will only excite their rage and disgust.
Women will burst out laughing insofar as the judgments made on them here seem false to them, the motives of their actions ill-explained, and the subtle turnings of their hearts clumsily handled, and they will express shock at such gross stupidity. They may be right. Truth in matters of love is like the way we wear our hair. Women wear it long and braided, and men short. It differs with the sex.
I am also well aware that the idle rich will think that women are only seduced by fortune and its advantages—dinners in expensive restaurants, gifts of jewels, automobiles. That is only partly true. The orchestra of the Café de Paris is not enough to diminish the sadness of certain eyes; however fine the motor, however great the horsepower in his car, will the rich driver find his lady love’s lost regret along the roadside?
This book is written for people with middling physical attributes and an average fortune who believe that love is the most precious thing in the world, that it is the one thing on which we must concentrate all our effort, for from love comes all our happiness.
They will understand me if they are the type who is a little cold, whom too much sensitivity has brought to that coldness; if they are old romantics stripped of their showy emotions, like those wines which, as they age, lose their fragrance, but keep their intoxicating power.
They will make the best of an excessive sincerity that is honest with itself; they will perhaps admit with the author that there is a great virtue in the admission that illusion is not divine. And for the rest, they will know very well that there are more tears hidden in laughter than in forced grimness, if they love that at which they smile.