Thackeray wrote of a fashionable lady cousin in Paris:
“She is come to ‘my dearest William’ now, though she doesn’t care a fig for me. She told me astonishing things, showed me a letter in which every word was true, and which was a fib from beginning to end. A miracle of deception – flattered, fondled, coaxed. Oh, she was worth coming to Paris for!… Pray God to keep us simple. I have never looked at anything in my life which has so amazed me.”
Scribner