X

MLLE. DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L'ESTORADE
January.

Oh! Renee, you have made me miserable for days! So that bewitching
body, those beautiful proud features, that natural grace of manner,
that soul full of priceless gifts, those eyes, where the soul can
slake its thirst as at a fountain of love, that heart, with its
exquisite delicacy, that breadth of mind, those rare powers--fruit of
nature and of our interchange of thought--treasures whence should
issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to
outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious
gesture,--all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame,
commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which
you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born.
They will be monsters!

So you know all that lies before you; you have nothing left to hope,
or fear, or suffer? And supposing the glorious morning rises which
will bring you face to face with the man destined to rouse you from
the sleep into which you are plunging! . . . Ah! a cold shiver goes
through me at the thought!

Well, at least you have a friend. You, it is understood, are to be the
guardian angel of your valley. You will grow familiar with its
beauties, will live with it in all its aspects, till the grandeur of
nature, the slow growth of vegetation, compared with the lightning