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Ernest Maltravers — Volume 07 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 11 of 51 (21%)

But De Montaigne's letters to Maltravers consoled him for the loss of
less congenial friends. The Frenchman was now an eminent and celebrated
man; and his appreciation of Maltravers was sweeter to the latter than
would have been the huzzas of crowds. But, all this while, his vanity
was pleased and his curiosity roused by the continued correspondence of
his unseen Egeria. That correspondence (if so it may be called, being
all on one side) had now gone on for a considerable time, and he was
still wholly unable to discover the author: its tone had of late
altered--it had become more sad and subdued--it spoke of the hollowness
as well as the rewards of fame; and, with a touch of true womanly
sentiment, often hinted more at the rapture of soothing dejection, than
of sharing triumph. In all these letters, there was the undeniable
evidence of high intellect and deep feeling; they excited a strong and
keen interest in Maltravers, yet the interest was not that which made
him wish to discover, in order that he might love, the writer. They
were for the most part too full of the irony and bitterness of a man's
spirit, to fascinate one who considered that gentleness was the essence
of a woman's strength. Temper spoke in them, no less than mind and
heart, and it was not the sort of temper which a man who loves women to
be womanly could admire.

"I hear you often spoken of" (ran one of these strange epistles), "and I
am almost equally angry whether fools presume to praise or to blame you.
This miserable world we live in, how I loathe and disdain it!--yet I
desire you to serve and to master it! Weak contradiction, effeminate
paradox! Oh! rather a thousand times that you would fly from its mean
temptations and poor rewards!--if the desert were your dwelling-place
and you wished one minister, I could renounce all--wealth, flattery,
repute, womanhood--to serve you.
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