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.