Letters of Two Brides

LOUISE TO FELIPE

I am not pleased with you. If you did not cry over Racine's

Berenice, and feel it to be the most terrible of tragedies, there is

no kinship in our souls; we shall never get on together, and had

better break off at once. Let us meet no more. Forget me; for if I do

not have a satisfactory reply, I shall forget you. You will become M.

le Baron de Macumer for me, or rather you will cease to be at all.

Yesterday at Mme. d'Espard's you had a self-satisfied air which

disgusted me. No doubt, apparently, about your conquest! In sober

earnest, your self-possession alarms me. Not a trace in you of the

humble slave of your first letter. Far from betraying the

absent-mindedness of a lover, you polished epigrams! This is not the

attitude of a true believer, always prostrate before his divinity.

If you do not feel me to be the very breath of your life, a being

nobler than other women, and to be judged by other standards, then I

must be less than a woman in your sight. You have roused in me a

spirit of mistrust, Felipe, and its angry mutterings have drowned the

accents of tenderness. When I look back upon what has passed between

us, I feel in truth that I have a right to be suspicious. For know,

Prime Minister of all the Spains, that I have reflected much on the

defenceless condition of our sex. My innocence has held a torch, and

my fingers are not burnt. Let me repeat to you, then, what my youthful

experience taught me.

In all other matters, duplicity, faithlessness, and broken pledges are

brought to book and punished; but not so with love, which is at once

the victim, the accuser, the counsel, judge, and executioner. The

cruelest treachery, the most heartless crimes, are those which remain

for ever concealed, with two hearts alone for witness. How indeed

should the victim proclaim them without injury to herself? Love,

therefore, has its own code, its own penal system, with which the

world has no concern.

Now, for my part, I have resolved never to pardon a serious

misdemeanor, and in love, pray, what is not serious? Yesterday you had

all the air of a man successful in his suit. You would be wrong to

doubt it; and yet, if this assurance robbed you of the charming

simplicity which sprang from uncertainty, I should blame you severely.

I would have you neither bashful nor self-complacent; I would not have

you in terror of losing my affection--that would be an insult--but

neither would I have you wear your love lightly as a thing of course.