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.