have the most elevated feelings under the veil of the most cynical
libertinism? She says that in Parma she wishes to remain perfectly
unknown, her own mistress, and I cannot, of course, flatter myself that
she will not place me under the same restrictions as the captain to whom
she has already abandoned herself. Goodbye to my expectations, to my
money, and my illusions! But who is she--what is she? She must have
either a lover or a husband in Parma, or she must belong to a respectable
family; or, perhaps, thanks to a boundless love for debauchery and to her
confidence in her own charms, she intends to set fortune, misery, and
degradation at defiance, and to try to enslave some wealthy nobleman! But
that would be the plan of a mad woman or of a person reduced to utter
despair, and it does not seem to be the case with Henriette. Yet she
possesses nothing. True, but she refused, as if she had been provided
with all she needed, the kind assistance of a man who has the right to
offer it, and from whom, in sooth, she can accept without blushing, since
she has not been ashamed to grant him favours with which love had nothing
to do. Does she think that it is less shameful for a woman to abandon
herself to the desires of a man unknown and unloved than to receive a
present from an esteemed friend, and particularly at the eve of finding
herself in the street, entirely destitute in the middle of a foreign
city, amongst people whose language she cannot even speak? Perhaps she
thinks that such conduct will justify the 'faux pas' of which she has
been guilty with the captain, and give him to understand that she had
abandoned herself to him only for the sake of escaping from the officer
with whom she was in Rome. But she ought to be quite certain that the
captain does not entertain any other idea; he shews himself so reasonable
that it is impossible to suppose that he ever admitted the possibility of
having inspired her with a violent passion, because she had seen him once
through a window in Civita-Vecchia. She might possibly be right, and feel
herself justified in her conduct towards the captain, but it is not the