Like all women, she liked to please; her success was sweet to her vanity; perhaps flattery turned her head at times, but in the midst of this tumult her heart remained in perfect peace.

She found so little danger for herself in the game she played that it did not seem to her that it could be very serious for others.

Genuine love is not common enough in Parisian parlors for a pretty woman to conceive any great remorse at pleasing without loving.
"Madame de Bergenheim was thus, ingenuously, unsuspectingly, a matchless coquette.

Never having loved, not even her husband, she looked upon her little intriguing as one of the rights earned on the day of her marriage, the same as her diamonds and cashmeres.

There was something touching in the sound of her voice and in her large, innocent eyes which she sometimes allowed to rest upon mine, without thinking to turn them away, and which said, 'I have never loved.' As for myself, I believed it all; one is so happy to believe! "Far from being annoyed at the trap she laid for me, I, on the contrary, ran my head into it and presented my neck to the yoke with a docility which must have amused her, I think; but I hoped not to bear it alone.
A coquette who coolly flaunts her triumphs to the world resembles those master-swimmers who, while spectators are admiring the grace of their poses, are struck by an unexpected current; the performer is sometimes swept away and drowned without his elegant strokes being of much service to him.