Letters of Two Brides

MLLE. DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L'ESTORADE

January.

Oh! Renee, you have made me miserable for days! So that bewitching

body, those beautiful proud features, that natural grace of manner,

that soul full of priceless gifts, those eyes, where the soul can

slake its thirst as at a fountain of love, that heart, with its

exquisite delicacy, that breadth of mind, those rare powers--fruit of

nature and of our interchange of thought--treasures whence should

issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to

outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious

gesture,--all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame,

commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which

you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born.

They will be monsters!

So you know all that lies before you; you have nothing left to hope,

or fear, or suffer? And supposing the glorious morning rises which

will bring you face to face with the man destined to rouse you from

the sleep into which you are plunging! . . . Ah! a cold shiver goes

through me at the thought! Well, at least you have a friend.

You, it is understood, are to be the

guardian angel of your valley. You will grow familiar with its

beauties, will live with it in all its aspects, till the grandeur of

nature, the slow growth of vegetation, compared with the lightning

rapidity of thought, become like a part of yourself; and as your eye

rests on the laughing flowers, you will question your own heart. When

you walk between your husband, silent and contented, in front, and

your children screaming and romping behind, I can tell you beforehand

what you will write to me.

Your misty valley, your hills, bare or

clothed with magnificent trees, your meadow, the wonder of Provence,

with its fresh water dispersed in little runlets, the different

effects of the atmosphere, this whole world of infinity which laps you

round, and which God has made so various, will recall to you the

infinite sameness of your soul's life. But at least I shall be there,

my Renee, and in me you will find a heart which no social pettiness

shall ever corrupt, a heart all your own. Monday.

My dear, my Spaniard is quite adorably melancholy; there is something

calm, severe, manly, and mysterious about him which interests me

profoundly. His unvarying solemnity and the silence which envelops him

act like an irritant on the mind. His mute dignity is worthy of a

fallen king. Griffith and I spend our time over him as though he were

a riddle. How odd it is! A language-master captures my fancy as no other man has

done. Yet by this time I have passed in review all the young men of

family, the attaches to embassies, and the ambassadors, generals, and

inferior officers, the peers of France, their sons and nephews, the

court, and the town. The coldness of the man provokes me.