Letters of Two Brides

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE MAUCOMBE.

PARIS, September.

Sweetheart, I too am free! And I am the first too, unless you have

written to Blois, at our sweet tryst of letter-writing.

Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence,

and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my

first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a

second love? Don't go running on like this, you will say, but tell me rather how

you made your escape from the convent where you were to take your

vows.

Well, dear, I don't know about the Carmelites, but the miracle

of my own deliverance was, I can assure you, most humdrum. The cries

of an alarmed conscience triumphed over the dictates of a stern policy

--there's the whole mystery. The sombre melancholy which seized me

after you left hastened the happy climax, my aunt did not want to see

me die of a decline, and my mother, whose one unfailing cure for my

malady was a novitiate, gave way before her.

So I am in Paris, thanks to you, my love! Dear Renee, could you have

seen me the day I found myself parted from you, well might you have

gloried in the deep impression you had made on so youthful a bosom. We

had lived so constantly together, sharing our dreams and letting our

fancy roam together, that I verily believe our souls had become welded

together, like those two Hungarian girls, whose death we heard about

from M. Beauvisage--poor misnamed being! Never surely was man better

cut out by nature for the post of convent physician!

Tell me, did you not droop and sicken with your darling?

In my gloomy depression, I could do nothing but count over the ties

which bind us. But it seemed as though distance had loosened them; I

wearied of life, like a turtle-dove widowed of her mate. Death smiled

sweetly on me, and I was proceeding quietly to die. To be at Blois, at

the Carmelites, consumed by dread of having to take my vows there, a

Mlle. de la Valliere, but without her prelude, and without my Renee!

How could I not be sick--sick unto death?

How different it used to be! That monotonous existence, where every

hour brings its duty, its prayer, its task, with such desperate

regularity that you can tell what a Carmelite sister is doing in any

place, at any hour of the night or day; that deadly dull routine,

which crushes out all interest in one's surroundings, had become for

us two a world of life and movement. Imagination had thrown open her

fairy realms, and in these our spirits ranged at will, each in turn

serving as magic steed to the other, the more alert quickening the

drowsy; the world from which our bodies were shut out became the

playground of our fancy, which reveled there in frolicsome adventure.