Love, Gallantry. These are not synonyms.

Gallantry is born of a desire to please, without a firm attachment that has its source in the heart. Love is the charm of loving and being loved.

Gallantry is the use of certain pleasures that one occasionally seeks out, that one varies out of disgust and infidelity. In love , the continuity of feeling enhances its sensuality, and often one's pleasure is extinguished through the pleasures themselves.

Gallantry , owing its origin to temperament and complexion, ends only when age comes to tarnish its source. Love always breaks its chains through the effort of powerful reasoning, in the caprice of a sustained vexation, or even still, by absence; thus it fades as one sees the material fire burn out.

Gallantry pulls one towards people who are beautiful or attractive, unites us to those who respond to our desires, and leaves us with a taste for others. Love delivers our heart without reserve to one person alone who fills it entirely; such that we are left with only indifference for all the other beauties of the universe.

Gallantry is linked to the idea of conquest by false honor, or by vanity; love consists in tender, delicate, and respectful feeling, a sentiment that must be elevated to the order of virtue.

Gallantry is not difficult to unravel; it allows to be perceived, in all sorts of characters, only a taste founded on the senses. Love diversifies, according to the different souls upon which it acts. It reigns with fury in Medea, while in sweet dispositions it lights a fire similar to that of incense burning on the altar. Ovid speaks of gallantry, and Tibulle sighs of love.

It is of love that Lydie suffers, when she cries:

Calais is charming; but I love only you. Ingrate, my heart defends you; Equally happy in such sweet bonds To lose or to spend my life. Trans. M. le duc de Nivernois.

When the niece of the Cardinal of Mazarin, receiving an order to surrender herself to Brouage, says to Louis XIV: "Ah, sire, you are king, you love me, and I leave," these words that say so many things, don't have anything to do with gallantry ; it is the language of love that she was using. Berenice in Racine does not speak as well to Titus.

When Despreaux had wanted to mock Quinault, by describing him as sweet and tender, he did but give to this amiable poet, a praise that he had legitimately earned. It was not there that he should have attacked Quinault; rather, he could have reproached him for frequently showing himself more gallant than tender, passionate, in love, and for wrongfully confusing these two things in his writing.

Love is often a check on vice, and ordinarily allies itself with virtues. Gallantry is a vice, as it is the libertinage of the mind, of the imagination, of the senses; this is why, following the remark of the author of the spirit of the Laws, good legislators have always banned the commerce of gallantry that is produced by idleness, and that causes women to corrupt others even before they are corrupted, that puts a price on trivial things, belittles that which is important, and makes it so that one conducts oneself only by the maxims of ridicule that women know so well how to establish.