Madam, let me be very candid; I have a warm temperament, certainly--more
so, perhaps, than an ordinary Provençal. I will confess to even more
than this, if your grace so wills it, and I will not blush for it; but
pray condescend to believe that I am also a respecter of conventional
proprieties, and that I should feel most keenly the loss of your esteem
in this regard.
Now, from a few words of satirical wit, concealed like
small serpents under the flowery condolences of your malicious letter, I
concluded that this miserable fellow Louis, abandoning all
considerations of delicacy, and at the risk of ruining my reputation,
had played me a most abominable trick, by reading out to you all the
nonsense which I wrote to him last week. You need not deny it! He
confesses it to-day, unblushingly, in the budget of news which he sends
me, adding that you "laughed over it." Good gracious! what can you have
thought of me? After such a story, I certainly could never again look
you in the face, but that I can clear myself by assuring you at once
that all this tale was nothing but a mystification, invented as a return
for some of his impertinent chaff regarding my uncle Barbassou's will.
Louis fell into the trap like any booby. But for him to have drawn you
with him, is enough to make me die of shame.
Madam, I prefer now to make my confession. I am not the hero of a
romance of the Harem. I am a good young man, an advocate of morality and
propriety, notwithstanding the fact that you have often honoured me with
the title of "a regular original." Be so good as to believe, then, that
the most I have been guilty of is a too artless simplicity of character.
I did not suppose that Louis would show you this eccentric letter, for I
had expressly enjoined him to keep it from you. My only crime therefore
in all this matter has been that I forgot that a woman of your
intelligence would read everything, when she had the mind to do so, and
a husband like yours.
In fact, madam, I hardly know why I have taken the trouble to excuse
myself with so much deliberation. I perceive that by such apologies I
run the risk of aggravating my mistake. What did I write, after all, but
a very commonplace specimen of those Arabian stories which girls such
as you have read continually in the winter evenings, under the eyes of
their delighted mothers? When I consider it, I begin to understand that
your laughter, if you did laugh, must have been at the feebleness of my
imagination--you compared it with the Palace of gold and the thousand
wives of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid.--But please remember, once more,
that I am a poor Provençal and not a Sultan.