Les Bijoux Indiscrets by Denis Diderot

Mirzoza had already fixed Mangogul for some years. These lovers had said, and a thousand times repeated, all that a violent passion suggests to persons who have the most wit. They were got as far as confidences, and they would impute it to themselves as a crime, to conceal the most minute circumstance of their lives from each other. These singular suppositions, "If heaven, which has placed me on the throne, had given me an obscure low birth, would you have deign'd to descend down to me, would Mirzoza have crown'd me? " "Should Mirzoza happen to lose the few charms which she is thought to have, would Mangogul love her still? " These suppositions, I say, which exercise the fancy of ingenious lovers, which sometimes make tender lovers quarrel, and frequently oblige the most sincere lovers to tell untruths, were quite worn out between our pair.

The favorite, who possess'd in a supreme degree, the necessary and uncommon talent of making a good narrative, had drained the scandalous history of Banza. As she had not the best constitution, she was not always disposed to receive the Sultan's caresses, nor he always in the humour of offering them. In short, there were some days, in which Mangogul and Mirzoza had little to say, hardly any thing to do, and in which, without any diminution of love, they amused themselves but indifferently. Those days were rare indeed, but there were some; and this was one of them.