Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan is a refined comedy on the art of remaking one's reputation. The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, become through the reverses of fortune and time the Princesse de Cadignan, drags behind her a heavy past: a long string of gallant adventures and scandalous liaisons that have made her, in the world's eyes, a dangerous, lost woman. But she conceives a last desire: to inspire a true and pure love in a man of worth, the celebrated writer Daniel d'Arthez — a noble, sincere mind who has held aloof from intrigue. With consummate skill, the princess undertakes to reinvent herself in his eyes: she presents herself as a slandered woman, a victim of circumstance and of men, whose virtue and delicacy have been misunderstood; she transforms her scandalous biography into a martyrology of persecuted innocence. D'Arthez, though warned by friends about the lady's reputation, lets himself be seduced by this staging of purity and deliberately chooses to believe the touching image she offers him. Love is born, founded on a cleverly constructed illusion but embraced wholeheartedly. Balzac unfolds a fine analysis of superior coquetry and of the feminine art of dissimulation, while suggesting that the sincerity of love can accommodate falsehood, and even feed on it. The tale, brilliant and ironic, is a reflection on reputation, on the malleability of the past, and on amorous complaisance. It illustrates Balzac's talent for the depiction of salons and sentimental strategies, and gives, with the Princesse de Cadignan, one of his subtlest female portraits, in which the cunning woman plays the ingenue to win at last a sincere heart.