LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE L'ESTORADE
June.
Dear wedded sweetheart,--Your letter has arrived at the very moment to
hearten me for a bold step which I have been meditating night and day.
I feel within me a strange craving for the unknown, or, if you will,
the forbidden, which makes me uneasy and reveals a conflict in
progress in my soul between the laws of society and of nature. I
cannot tell whether nature in me is the stronger of the two, but I
surprise myself in the act of meditating between the hostile powers.
In plain words, what I wanted was to speak with Felipe, alone, at
night, under the lime-trees at the bottom of our garden. There is no
denying that this desire beseems the girl who has earned the epithet
of an "up-to-date young lady," bestowed on me by the Duchess in jest,
and which my father has approved.
Yet to me there seems a method in this madness. I should recompense
Felipe for the long nights he has passed under my window, at the same
time that I should test him, by seeing what he thinks of my escapade
and how he comports himself at a critical moment. Let him cast a halo
round my folly--behold in him my husband; let him show one iota less
of the tremulous respect with which he bows to me in the
Champs-Elysees--farewell, Don Felipe.
As for society, I run less risk in meeting my lover thus than when I
smile to him in the drawing-rooms of Mme. de Maufrigneuse and the old
Marquise de Beauseant, where spies now surround us on every side; and
Heaven only knows how people stare at the girl, suspected of a
weakness for a grotesque, like Macumer
. I cannot tell you to what a state of agitation I am reduced by
dreaming of this idea, and the time I have given to planning its
execution. I wanted you badly. What happy hours we should have
chattered away, lost in the mazes of uncertainty, enjoying in
anticipation all the delights and horrors of a first meeting in the
silence of night, under the noble lime-trees of the Chaulieu mansion,
with the moonlight dancing through the leaves! As I sat alone, every
nerve tingling, I cried, "Oh! Renee, where are you?" Then your letter
came, like a match to gunpowder, and my last scruples went by the
board.
Through the window I tossed to my bewildered adorer an exact tracing
of the key of the little gate at the end of the garden, together with
this note: "Your madness must really be put a stop to. If you broke your
neck, you would ruin the reputation of the woman you profess to
love. Are you worthy of a new proof of regard, and do you deserve
that I should talk with you under the limes at the foot of the
garden at the hour when the moon throws them into shadow?"