accompany a ceremony of the kind, and to be my natural self. Perhaps I
may have been taken for an old bird, as they say at Blois. A young
girl, delighted with the novel and hopeful situation she had contrived
to make for herself, and may have passed for a strong-minded female.

Dear, the difficulties which would beset my life had appeared to me
clearly as in a vision, and I was sincerely anxious to make the
happiness of the man I married. Now, in the solitude of a life like
ours, marriage soon becomes intolerable unless the woman is the
presiding spirit. A woman in such a case needs the charm of a
mistress, combined with the solid qualities of a wife. To introduce an
element of uncertainty into pleasure is to prolong illusion, and
render lasting those selfish satisfactions which all creatures hold,
and should shroud a woman in expectancy, crown her sovereign, and
invest her with an exhaustless power, a redundancy of life, that makes
everything blossom around her. The more she is mistress of herself,
the more certainly will the love and happiness she creates be fit to
weather the storms of life.

But, above all, I have insisted on the greatest secrecy in regard to
our domestic arrangements. A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is
justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be
entirely concealed. The charm of all we do lies in its unobtrusiveness.
If I have made it my task to raise a drooping courage and restore their
natural brightness to gifts which I have dimly descried, it must all
seem to spring from Louis himself.

Such is the mission to which I dedicate myself, a mission surely not
ignoble, and which might well satisfy a woman's ambition. Why, I could
glory in this secret which shall fill my life with interest, in this