_To Miss Mitford_

[Paris,] 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysées:
[January-February 1852].

My very dear friend, let me begin what I have to say by recognising you
as the most generous and affectionate of friends. I never could mistake
the least of your intentions; you were always, from first to last, kind
and tenderly indulgent to me--always exaggerating what was good in me,
always forgetting what was faulty and weak--keeping me by force of
affection in a higher place than I could aspire to by force of vanity;
loving me always, in fact. Now let me tell you the truth. It will prove
how hard it is for the tenderest friends to help paining one another,
since _you_ have pained _me_. See what a deep wound I must have in me,
to be pained by the touch of such a hand. Oh, I am morbid, I very well
know. But the truth is that I have been miserably upset by your book,
and that if I had had the least imagination of your intending to touch
upon certain biographical details in relation to me, I would have
conjured you by your love to me and by my love to you, to forbear it
altogether. You cannot understand; no, you cannot understand with all
your wide sympathy (perhaps, because you are not morbid, and I am), the
sort of susceptibility I have upon one subject. I have lived heart to
heart (for instance) with my husband these five years: I have never yet
spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart
or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his
lips. And now those dreadful words are going the round of the
newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about
everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a
child in the dark--as unreasonably, you will say--but what then? what
drives us mad is our unreason. I will tell you how it was. First of all,