with the certainty of not having opposed the wishes of Mademoiselle,
your daughter."

"I hope to be free"--did he "hope"? That was his polite way of putting
the matter. Or he may have believed that he had conquered his love for
Eleonore Broudou, and that she, as a French girl who understood his
obligations to his family, would--perhaps after making a few
handkerchiefs damp with her tears--acquiesce.

So the negotiations went on, and at length, in May, 1783, the de Vesian
family accepted Laperouse as the fiance of their daughter. "My project
is to live with my family and yours," he wrote. "I hope that my wife
will love my mother and my sisters, as I feel that I shall love you and
yours. Any other manner of existence is frightful to me, and I have
sufficient knowledge of the world and of myself to know that I can only
be happy in living thus."

But in the very month that he wrote contracting himself--that is
precisely the word--to marry the girl he had never seen, Eleonore, the
girl whom he had seen, whom he had loved, and whom he still loved in
his heart, came to Paris with her parents. Laperouse saw her again. He
told her what had occurred. Of course she wept; what girl would not?
She said, between her sobs, that if it was to be all over between them
she would go into a convent. She could never marry anyone else.

"Mon histoire est un roman," and here beginneth the new chapter of this
real love story. Why, we wonder, has not some novelist discovered these
Laperouse letters and founded a tale upon them? Is it not a better
story even told in bare outline in these few pages, than nine-tenths of
the concoctions of the novelists, which are sold in thousands? Think of