WORKS OF
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

EDITED BY
Prof. GEORGE SAINTSBURY, M.A.
LETTERS TO
AN UNKNOWN
BIGELOW, BROWN & CO., Inc.
NEW YORK
Copyright, 1905
By FRANK S. HOLBY
———
All Rights Reserved
PRINTED BY C. H. SIMONDS COMPANY BOSTON, MASS., U. S. A.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

I MET Mérimée frequently in society. He was a tall man, erect in his bearing, pale, and, excepting his smile, had the appearance of an Englishman; he had, at all events, that cold, distant manner which forbids in advance any attempt at familiarity. Merely to see him one was impressed by his callousness, either natural or acquired, by his self-control, by his determined self-repression. On ceremonious occasions, especially, the immobility of his countenance was conspicuously manifest.

Even in the society of his intimate friends, and when relating a witty anecdote, his voice retained its habitual calmness and tranquillity, with never an outburst, never a sign of enthusiasm. The drollest details he described in the most precise language, in the tone of a man asking for a cup of tea. All evidences of sensibility he had mastered until it seemed a quality absent from his nature. Not that it was so—quite the contrary; but race-horses there are so well trained that, once under their master’s hand, they never so much as make a sudden start.

His training, it must be said, had begun early. When ten or eleven years old, I imagine, having committed some impropriety, he was scolded severely and sent from the room. Weeping and in great distress, he was just closing the door when he heard laughter within the room, and some one said: “Poor child! he believes we are really angry with him!” Intolerable to him was the idea of being a dupe, and he resolved thereupon to overcome a sensitiveness which had caused him such humiliation. He kept his word. “Remember to mistrust,” such was his motto.

To guard against every manifestation of pleasure, never to abandon himself unreservedly to the expression of emotion, to be tricked neither by others nor by himself, in his conduct and his writings to have in view the constant presence of an unsympathetic, mocking spectator; to be himself that spectator—these are the most distinguishing characteristics of his nature, of which every phase of his life, of his work, and of his talent bears the imprint.[1]

His attitude was always that of an amateur; it can hardly be otherwise with one who is endowed with the critical temperament. From turning the tapestry around and around, one ends by seeing nothing but the wrong side; and thus, instead of lovely figures, gracefully posed, one sees only the rough bits of embroidery silk. To such a one, it is irksome with forbearance to engage in any public work; to cast in his lot even with the party of his choice, with the school of his preference, the science which he pursues, the art in which he excels; and if, at times, he descends voluntarily into the contest, more frequently he regards it from afar.

At an early age he was placed in comfortable circumstances, then in an employment which was both congenial and interesting, that of Inspector of Historic Monuments. He then succeeded to a seat in the Senate Chamber, and later to a post at court.

As Inspector of Historic Monuments, he was capable, painstaking, and valuable; in the Senate he had the good taste to be usually absent or silent; at court, he enjoyed perfect freedom of action and of speech. To travel, to study, to mingle with men and affairs, such was his real occupation, and his official claims proved no restraint to the indulgence of his tastes. We must remember, too, that a man of such genius compels respect, even in the face of obstacles. His irony pierces the best case-hardened armour. Let us see with what ease and grace he handles it, even to the point of directing it against himself, thus making a double shot.

One day, at Biarritz, he had read one of his novels to the empress. “Not long afterward I received a visit from a policeman, who said he had been sent by the grand-duchess. ‘In what way may I serve you?’ ‘I come in the name of her royal highness, to beg that you will attend her this evening with your novel.’ ‘What novel?’ ‘The one you read to her majesty the other day.’ I replied that I had the honour to be her majesty’s jester, and that without her permission I could not accept engagements outside the court. I flew without delay to tell her the incident, expecting that the result would be, at the very least, a war with Russia, and I was no little chagrined not only to receive authority to go, but to go that very evening to the home of the grand-duchess, to whom the policeman had been assigned as factotum. However, to soothe my feelings I wrote a letter to the grand-duchess giving her a piece of my mind. This letter, ‘giving her a piece of my mind,’ must have been an interesting composition, and I am sure the factotum did not show himself again.”

As for formal gatherings, it would be impossible for any one to address them with more seriousness of demeanour and with less inward deference. Grave, sedate, of dignified carriage, when making an Academic visit, or delivering an impromptu address in public, his manner was irreproachable; but all the while the bird-organ behind the scenes was playing a comic air which turned both the orator and the audience to ridicule. “The president of the Antiquarian Society rose from his seat, all the other guests following his example. He began to speak, saying that inasmuch as from those aspects I was a man of notable attainments, he wished to propose my health, as senator, as man of letters, and as a scholar. There was only the table between us, and I was strongly tempted to hurl a glass of Roman punch at his head.... The next morning I listened to the minutes of the proceedings of the night before, in which it was stated that I had delivered a most eloquent address. I made a speech, to urge that all the adverbs be omitted from the report, but my request was not granted.”

While a candidate for the Academy of Inscriptions, he was taken to call upon some learned persons of formidable aspect; he wrote, on his return: “Have you ever seen dogs entering a badger’s hole? Before they have had some experience in this occupation, they make, on entering, a desperate show of fierceness, and not infrequently come out much faster than they go in, for the badger is an ugly beast to visit. I never touch the door-bell of an Academician that I am not reminded of the badger, and compare myself, in my mind’s eye, to the dog I have just described. I have not yet been bitten, however, but I have had some ludicrous encounters.”

He was elected, and had, along with others, his archæological burrow. It is easy to guess, however, that his was not the temperament to be restricted to this or to any place of hiding. For him there were always several modes of exit. In him were two individualities: one which acquitted himself conscientiously of the essential duties and ceremonials incumbent upon him as a member of society; the other dwelling beside or above the first, and in contempt or resignation observing his actions.

Similarly, in his affections he had within him two distinct personalities. The first, the natural man, was kind, even tender. In friendship no one was more loyal, more trustworthy. Once he had extended his hand, there was no withdrawal. We see an instance of this in his defence of M. Libri, in opposition to the decision of the judges and to public sentiment. It was the act of a knight, who single-handed combats a whole army. Fined, and condemned to prison, he assumed no martyr’s airs, and in submitting to his misfortune, brought to it all the grace that he had brought of courage to its provocation. He has never referred to it, save in a preface, and then only by way of apology, stating that he had been compelled “during the preceding month of July to spend a fortnight in a place in which he was not at all inconvenienced by the sunshine, and where he enjoyed unlimited leisure.” Nothing more. It is the prudent, subtle smile of a gallant man.

He was, moreover, helpful and obliging. People who approached him to ask a favour went away discouraged because of his cold aspect, but a month later he would call upon them with the requested favour in his pocket. In his correspondence he gives expression to a striking phrase, to the truth of which all his friends will bear testimony: “It seldom happens that I sacrifice others to myself, and when this does occur I am overcome with remorse.”

Toward the close of his life there lived in his home two elderly English ladies, to whom he seldom spoke and to whom apparently he gave little attention; yet a friend of mine found him in tears because one of them was ill. He never spoke of his most profound sentiments. Here we have a correspondence of love, which developed into friendship lasting for thirty years; the final letter was written the last day of his life, and yet no one knows the name of his correspondent. To one who can read these letters understandingly they are all that is graceful, tender, and delicate, truly affectionate, and—who would imagine it?—at times poetic, imaginative even, like a German lyric.

The following incident is so strange, that it must be quoted almost wholly:

“You have been such a long time writing to me that I began to be very uneasy. Besides, I have been harassed by an absurd idea, which I have not dared to tell you before. I was visiting the amphitheatre at Nîmes with an architect of the department, who was explaining to me at length the repairs which he had had made there, when I saw ten feet away a lovely bird, a little larger than a tomtit, with a linen-gray body, and wings of red, black and white. This bird was perched on a cornice, gazing at me fixedly. I interrupted the architect, who is a great sportsman, to ask him the name of the bird. He told me he had never seen one like it. I approached, and, perching a few steps beyond, and still watching me, the bird did not take flight until I was close enough to touch it. Wherever I went the bird seemed to follow, for I saw it on every tier of the amphitheatre. It had no companion, and its flight was noiseless, like that of a bird of night.

“The next day I returned to the amphitheatre, and there was my bird again. I had brought some bread with me, which I threw to it. The bird looked at the food, but would not touch it. I then tempted it with a big grasshopper, thinking from the shape of the bill that it would eat insects, but the bird paid no attention to the grasshopper. The most learned ornithologist in the city told me that no bird of that species lived in the country.

“Finally, when I visited the amphitheatre for the last time, I found my bird again, still pursuing my steps, following me even into a narrow, dark corridor, where, bird of light that it was, it should not have dared to venture.

“I recalled then that the duchess of Buckingham had seen her husband in the form of a bird the day of his assassination, and the thought came to me that you were dead, perhaps, and that you had assumed this form in order to visit me. In spite of myself, I could not shake off this foolish idea, and I was delighted, I assure you, to see that your letter bore the date of the day when I had first seen my mysterious bird.”

It is thus that, even in a sceptic, affection and imagination are stirred; ‘tis a “piece of folly,” to be sure, but it is no less true that he was on the threshold of dreaming and in the highway of love.[2]

But along with the lover dwelt the critic, and the conflict between these two personages in the same man was productive of strange results. In such a case, it is better, perhaps, not to look too closely. “Do you realise,” said La Fontaine, “that I am as blind to the faults of persons whom I may love never so little, as if I were a mole living a hundred feet under the ground? No sooner do I feel an atom of love, than I hasten to moisten it with all the incense of my store-house.” This, perhaps, is the secret of his charm.

In the letters of Mérimée harsh words fall like rain amidst the soft ones; “I will admit that you have become much more beautiful physically, but not morally.... You still have a sylph-like figure, and, although I am somewhat blasé concerning black eyes, I have never seen any so large in Constantinople or in Smyrna.

“Now comes the reverse of the medal. In many respects you have remained a child, and you have become a hypocrite into the bargain.... You imagine that you are proud, but I regret to tell you that what you think is pride is only the petty vanity which one would expect in a religious temperament. It is the fashion nowadays to preach. Shall you follow it? That would be the finishing stroke.” And a little farther on: “In all that you say and do, you substitute invariably a conventional for a genuine sentiment.... I respect convictions, even those that seem to me the most absurd. You have a great many ridiculous notions (pardon the word), of which I should hesitate to deprive you since you are so fond of them, and have no others to take their place.”

After two months of affectionate words, of quarrels, and of meetings he concludes thus: “It seems to me you become more egotistical every day. When you speak of us, you mean only yourself. The more I think of this, the more deplorable it appears.... We are so unlike that it is hardly possible to understand each other.” It seems that he had met a character as restive and as independent as his own, “a lioness, though tame,” and he analyses it thus: “It is a pity we can not meet the day after having a quarrel, for I am sure we should be in a perfectly amiable frame of mind.... Without doubt, my most dangerous enemy to your heart or, if you prefer, my strongest rival, is your pride. Whatever wounds that, excites your indignation. This notion you carry out, perhaps unconsciously, in the most trifling matters. Is it not, for instance, your pride which is satisfied when I kiss your hand? This, you have said to me, makes you happy, and to this sensation you abandon yourself, because a demonstration of humility is gratifying to your pride.”

Four months later, while he is absent from Paris, after a more serious misunderstanding: “You are one of those chilly women of the North, who are governed only by the mind.... Farewell, since we can be friends only at a distance. When we have grown old, perhaps we shall meet again with pleasure.” Then, with a word of affection, he recovers his serenity. But the antagonism of their temperaments is bound to reappear. “Seldom do I reproach you, except for that lack of frankness, which keeps me constantly in a rage with you, compelled as I am always to search for your meaning under a disguise.... Why is it, when we have become all we are to each other, that you must reflect for several days before replying frankly to the simplest question of mine?... Between your reason and your heart, I never feel sure which will win; you do not know yourself, but you give the preference always to your reason.... If you have committed any wrong, it is assuredly that preference which you give to your pride over all the tenderness of your nature. The first sentiment is to the second as a colossus to a pygmy. And that pride of yours is at bottom nothing but a kind of selfishness.”

All this ended in a warm and lasting friendship. But do you not consider admirable his delightful manner of love-making? They met in the Louvre, at Versailles, and in the adjoining woods; they took long walks, even in January, several times a week; he admired “a radiant physiognomy, a splendid bearing, a white hand, superb black hair”; a mind whose intelligence and attainments were worthy of his own, the charms of an unusual type of beauty, the attractions of a broad and miscellaneous culture, the fascinations of a toilet, and a coquetry cleverly directed and managed; he breathed the exquisite perfume of an education so well chosen, and of a “nature so refined, that it summed up for him an entire civilisation”; to sum it all up, he was under the charm. Then the spectator reappears and resumes his post. He disputed the purport of a reply, of a gesture; he dissociated himself from his feelings that he might form an unbiassed judgment; he expressed candidly and epigrammatically his views one day, to regret them the next.

Such was the man as we find him reflected in his books. As a dilettante he wrote and studied, passing from one subject to another, as suggested by the occasion or his own fancy, without devoting himself to one system of knowledge, without dedicating himself to the worship of one idea. This was owing to no lack of study or of natural endowment; few men, on the contrary, have enjoyed a broader mental training. Besides French he was master of six languages, including their literature and philology: Italian, Greek, Latin, English, Spanish, and Russian. I believe, also, that he read German. An occasional phrase, or a reference in his correspondence, shows the extent to which he had directed these studies.

Calo he spoke in such a manner as to astonish the Spanish gipsies. He was familiar with the various Spanish dialects, and was able to decipher the archaic title-deeds of Catalonia. He understood perfectly English versification. Those only who have studied an entire literature, both in print and in manuscript, during the several successive periods of its development, in style and in orthography, are able to appreciate the skill and perseverance necessary to know Spanish as the author of Don Pedro knew it, and Russian as the author of The Cossacks and of The False Demetrius knew it. With a natural gift for languages, he pursued their acquirement even after reaching maturity. During the latter part of his life he became interested in philology, and while living in Cannes devoted himself to the critical studies which compose the comparative grammar.

To this acquaintance with books he had added that of monuments, his reports proving that throughout France he was the acknowledged expert in this branch of learning. He understood not only the purpose, but the technique, of architecture. Each ancient church he visited in person, conducting his examinations with the aid of the best architects the country afforded. His memory of local affairs was excellent by nature and by careful training.

Born in a family of artists, he was clever in the use of the brush, and as a water-colourist was equally skilful. In short, in this, as in everything he did, he went to the very foundations of the subject. Evasive expression he detested, writing no word until he had reached definite and absolute conclusions. It would be difficult to find a historian whose head was so complete a store-house of information relating to the past, who was himself, indeed, a whole library, a whole museum of information.

He possessed, besides, the rarer gifts of a knowledge of life and a clear imagination, by the exercise of which those relics of the past were revivified and lived again. He had travelled widely, having made one journey to the Orient and two to Greece; he had visited England, Spain, and other countries twelve or fifteen times, and wherever he went he had been a close observer of the manners and customs not only of the best society, but of the peasantry also: “Many a time have I broken bread with people whom an Englishman would not notice for fear of losing his self-respect. I have even drunk from the same bottle with a convict.”

He had lived on familiar terms with Spanish gipsies and toreadors. Many an evening he had told stories for the entertainment of a group of peasant men and women of Ardèche. One of the places where he felt most at home was in a Spanish venta, with the “mule-drivers and peasant women of Andalusia.”

He sought out types perverted, and types unsullied, “through an inexhaustible curiosity for every variety of the human species,” and thus formed in his memory a gallery of living pictures inestimably more precious than any other kind; for those of books and of edifices are but empty shells, once tenanted, but whose structure may be known only by imagining the forms that dwelt therein, from the poems that have survived. By a sort of divination, keen, accurate, and swift, he made this mental reconstruction. In the Chronicle of Charles IX, in The Experiments of an Adventurer, and in the Theater of Clara Gazul it is evident that such was his involuntary method. His writings tend naturally to the demi-dreams of the artist, to scenic effect, and to romance which clothes the dead past with new life. With splendid acquirements and talents like these, he might have occupied in the field of history and of art a position of eminent importance and distinction; yet as a historian he has taken but a mediocre place, and as an artist, his rank, while a high one, is of narrow limit.

The bent of his mind led Mérimée to be suspicious, and suspicion carried to excess is harmful. To obtain from the study of any subject all that it is able to bestow, one must, I fancy, give oneself to it without reserve, be wedded to it, indeed, but not treat it as a mistress to whom one is devoted for two or three years, only to discard and take a new one. A man produces the best of which he is capable only when, after conceiving to himself some form of art, some method of science, in short some general idea of his subject, he becomes so enamoured that he finds it possessing attractions above all else—himself especially—and worships it as a goddess, whom he is happy only in serving.

Mérimée, also, was capable of cherishing this affection and adoration, but after a time the critic within him awoke, bringing the goddess to trial, only to discover that she was not entirely divine. All our methods of science, all our forms of art, all our general ideas, have some weak spot; the inadequate, the uncertain, the expedient, the artificial, abound therein; only the illusion of love can find them perfect, and a sceptic does not remain long in love. He put on his magnifying glasses, and in the enchanting statue discovered a lack of poise, a vagueness and insincerity of construction, a modernity of attitude. Becoming disgusted, he turned away, not without reason, to be sure, and these reasons he explains in passing. He sees in our philosophy of history an element of speculation, in our mania for erudition the futility, inutility; he sees extravagance in our taste for the picturesque, and insipidity in our paintings of realism. Let inventors and simpletons, through vanity or stupidity, accept, if they like, such a system, such a style; but as for himself, he rejects it, or, if he has not rejected, he regrets that he has not done so.

“About the year of grace 1827 I belonged to the Romantic school. We said to the Classicists, ‘Without local colour, there is no hope of salvation,’ meaning by local colour that which in the seventeenth century was known as manners and customs. But we were mighty proud of our word, and imagined that we had invented both the word and the thing for which it stood.” When, later, he wrote some Illyrian poems which were construed by the critics beyond the Rhine with the utmost seriousness, he was able to boast of having, indeed, created local colour. “But,” said he, “the process was so simple, so easy, that I came at last to doubt the value of local colour itself, and forgave Racine for having clothed with civilisation the savage heroes of Sophocles and Euripides.”

Toward the end of his life, he avoided resolutely the acceptance of all theories; they were, in his opinion, good only to work on the credulity of philosophers and as a means of livelihood for professors. He accepted and repeated only anecdotes and small facts of observation in philology; for instance, the exact date when one ceases to meet in Old French the two cases derived from the Latin declension. By dint of his craving for certainty, knowledge came to be to him but a withered plant, a stalk devoid of blossoms. In no other way can we explain the lifelessness of his historical essays, Don Pedro, The Cossacks, The False Demetrius, The Social War, The Conspiracy of Catiline, studies vigorous, exhaustive, well-maintained and well-developed, but whose characters are not alive, probably because he did not care to give them life. For in another work, The Experiments of an Adventurer, he has caused the sap to return to the plant, so that it may be seen successively under its two aspects, dull and rigid in the historical herbarium, fresh and green in the work of art. In placing his Spaniards of the nineteenth century as the contemporaries of Sylla in this herbarium, they were as clearly seen by his inner vision, no doubt, as was his adventurer; at any rate, this would have been no more of a tax upon his mental retina. He was reluctant, however, to permit us to see them thus, conceding only facts which could bear the test of proof, refusing to give his own assumptions rather than authentic occurrences, critical to the impairment of his own work, severe to the point of suppressing the best part of himself, and of placing his imagination under the ban.

In his artistic works the critic still rules, but in this case his office is usually one of service, to control and to direct his talent like a spring which is confined within a pipe that it may gush forth in a stream slender and compressed. Certain gifts were his by nature which no amount of application can bestow, and which were never possessed by his master, Stendhal—the talent for scenic effect, for dialogue, for humorous situations. He knew the art of introducing two characters, and by their conversation alone of bringing them in strong relief before the vision of the reader. Like Stendhal, moreover, he understood personal peculiarities, and was a skilful story-teller. These clever powers he subjected to a severe training, and, by a double strain, endeavoured to compel them to yield the best results from the smallest material.

From the very first he had delighted in the Spanish drama, which is overflowing with vigour and action; and he borrowed a number of its situations to compose, under a fictitious name, some short pieces of deep purport and modern significance; and, a thing unique in the history of literature, many of these imitations—The Crisis and Perichole, for example—are superior to his original stories. Nowhere else do the characters stand out so distinctly and so energetically as in his comedies. In The Conspirators, and in The Two Heirs, each personage, according to Goethe, resembles one of those perfect watches of transparent crystal, in the face of which is visible, not only the exact time, but also the action of the entire interior mechanism. All the minutest details are burdened with significance.

It is the attribute of great masters of painting in five or six strokes of the crayon to sketch in a face which, once seen, can never be forgotten. Even in his less popular comedies—for example, in The Spaniards in Denmark—there are characters, like the Lieutenant Charles Leblanc and his mother, the spy, who will remain forever in the human memory.

If, indeed, so confirmed a sceptic had deigned to have any moral sensibility, he would have explained, I fancy, that to a good judge of mankind every individual is reduced to three or four essential qualities, which manifest themselves completely in a few significant actions; all else is but acquired, and therefore unimportant, to exhibit which is but a waste of time. Intelligent readers will take this for granted, and it is for intelligent readers only that one should write. Leave idle chatter to chatterers; deal with vital points only, and these exemplify by none but convincing actions. To condense, to curtail, to summarise life, is the purpose of art.

Such, at any rate, was his, which he realises even better in his romances than in his comedies, where the requirements of stage effect and of humorous situations can not fail to exaggerate incidents, to caricature truth, and to conceal behind a theatrical mask the living face.[3] The novelist, less hampered by restrictions and with wider resources at his command, may draw his characters with a more accurate and also a freer hand. Many of these novels are masterpieces, and we may believe that they will continue in the future to be held as classics.

For this assumption there are several reasons: In the first place, they have lived already for thirty or forty years, and Carmen, The Taking of the Redoubt, Colomba, Matteo Falcone, The Abbé Aubain, Arsène Guillot, The Venus of Ille, The Game of Backgammon, Tamango, even The Etruscan Vase, and The Double Mistake, are almost all little structures that stand now as firmly as the day they were erected. This is explained by the fact that they are built of carefully selected stone, not of stucco and other popular materials. Here we find none of those descriptions which pass out of fashion after half a century, and which to-day we consider so tiresome in the romances of Walter Scott; we see none of those reflections, disquisitions, interpretations, which we think so tedious in the novels of Fielding; nothing but action, and action never fails to be instructive. This is all the more striking inasmuch as important action only is introduced, intelligible alike to readers of another country and another century. In the works of Balzac and of Dickens, where this precaution was not observed, many minute details of local or technical significance will be lost, like a plastered wall which crumbles away, or they will be serviceable only to commentators in their commentaries.

A second reason for their endurance is the brevity of these romances, the longest of them consuming but half a volume, while one is but six pages. All, however, stand out clearly and are carefully developed, the interest centred around a single action and a single purpose. Now we must consider posterity in the light that we do a foreigner, in that it does not exercise the forbearance of contemporary readers, and that it does not tolerate tediousness; for how many persons to-day will submit to the eight volumes of Clarissa Harlowe? We must remember, in short, that human attention overtaxed ends invariably in bankruptcy; it is prudent, therefore, when after a century its consideration is still sought, to speak in language concise, clear, and open.

It is wise, moreover, in addressing posterity to choose interesting subjects and to treat them in an interesting way. Interesting subjects: that would exclude events essentially tame or commonplace, characters essentially colourless or ordinary. To treat these in an interesting way: which means situations and passions of sufficient vitality, after the lapse of a century, to have them serve actual conditions. The types chosen by Mérimée were sincere, strong, and original. We may compare them to medallions of durable metal, in bold relief, set in an appropriate frame and amid harmonious surroundings; an officer’s first battle, a Corsican vendetta, a slave-trader’s last voyage, a slip from the path of integrity, the sacrifice of a son by his father, a secret tragedy in a modern salon. Like the novels of Bandello and the Italian fiction-writers, almost all his tales are sanguinary, and are painful, besides, from the cold-bloodedness of the recital, the accuracy of the action, and the skilful convergence of details.

Far better, each one is, in its little setting, a record of human nature, a record, complete and of far-reaching import, to which a philosopher, a moralist, may return year after year without exhausting its interest.

Multitudes of dissertations on primitive and savage instinct, wise treatises, like those of Schopenhauer, on the metaphysics of love and of death, can not be compared in value to the hundred pages of Carmen.

The wax taper of Arsène Guillot summarises many volumes concerning the religion of the common people and of the inmost feelings of courtesans. I know of no more scathing sermon against the blunders of credulity or of imagination than The Double Mistake, and The Etruscan Vase. In the year 2000 The Game of Backgammon will be read again, probably, to learn what it costs to cheat.

Notice, finally, that at no time does the author force himself on our notice that he may emphasise the lesson, but remains in the background, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. He effaces himself even deliberately so as to appear altogether absent. Future readers will show consideration for a host so polite, so graceful, so discreet in doing the honours of his own home. Good manners are at all times pleasing, and a more courteous host than Mérimée it would be impossible to find. Greeting his guests at the threshold, he introduces them and then withdraws, leaving them at liberty to examine and to criticise undisturbed. He is not obtrusive; he does not call attention to his treasures; never will he be caught in the act of a display of vanity. Instead of exposing his knowledge, he conceals it; to listen to him, it would seem as if any one at all might have written his book. Now it is an anecdote related to him by one of his friends, and which he has transcribed on the spot; now it is “a selection” from Brantôme, and from d’Aubigné. If he wrote The Experiments of an Adventurer, it was because he had once, for a fortnight, had nothing better to do. For writing The Guzla, the recipe is simple: to procure statistics referring to Illyria, to get the travels of the Abbé Fortis, and to learn five or six Slav words. This resolution not to over-estimate himself comes to be in the end an affectation. So great is his dread of appearing pedantic that he flies to the opposite extreme, and the result is his tone of flippancy, his unceremonious manner of the man of society.

The day may come when this will prove to be his vulnerable point, when it will be asked whether this perpetual air of irony is not intentional; whether he is justified in joking in the very midst of tragedy; whether his apparent callousness is not due to the fear of ridicule; whether his free-and-easy tone is not the effect of embarrassment; whether the gentleman has not been harmful to the author; whether his art was sufficiently dear to him. On more than one occasion, notably in The Venus of Ille, he availed himself of this to mystify the reader. Elsewhere, in Lokis,[4] a grotesque idea, with double meaning, lies at the foundation of the tale, like a toad in a chiselled casket. He seemed to find delight in seeing a woman’s fingers unlock the casket, and a pretty face terrified by the sight of some object of loathing made him laugh. It appears that he wrote almost always at random, to amuse himself, to pass the time, without allowing himself to be swayed by an idea, with no conception of a great unity of purpose, with no self-subordination to his work.

In this, as in all else, he was disenchanted, and we find him finally out of tune with life. Scepticism engenders melancholy; and in this regard his correspondence is truly depressing. His health failed gradually; he spent his winters regularly at Cannes, realising that life was slipping away from him.

He took care of his health; he watched over himself; it is the sole concern which the man continued to feel until the end. By the advice of his physician, he practised archery, and as a distraction painted views of the adjacent country. Every day he might be seen walking in silence along the country roads with his two Englishwomen, one carrying his bow, the other his box of water-colours. In this way he killed time and cultivated patience. Out of kindliness of heart he went to a lonely cabin half a mile away, to nurse a cat; he collected flies for a pet lizard; these were his favorite companions. When the railway train brought a friend to visit him, he recovered his animation and became once more his charming self; his letters were so always, for his quaint and exquisite humour he could not repress. But of happiness there was none; to him the future was dark, almost as dark as it is to us to-day; before closing his eyes it was his sorrow to witness the complete destruction of his country’s edifice. He expired September 23, 1870.

If one should endeavour to sum up his character and his genius, he will find, I fancy, that with a tender heart, the gift of nature, endowed with superior intelligence, having lived the life of a gentleman and having worked with somewhat of industry, producing a number of books of the highest order, Mérimée did not, however, accomplish all the good that was his to yield, did not attain to all the happiness to which it was his right to aspire. Through his fear of being a dupe, he was suspicious in every phase of life—in love, in science, in art;[5] and yet he was the dupe of his own mistrust. One is sure always of being the dupe of something, and it may be better, perhaps, to reconcile oneself to the fact in advance.

H. TAINE.

November, 1873.

LETTERS TO AN UNKNOWN
Lettres à une Inconnue

I

Paris, Thursday.

I RECEIVED your letter in due time. Everything about you is paradoxical, and the same reasons lead you to act in a manner precisely contrary to that of other mortals. You say you are going to the country. Well and good; that signifies that you will have nothing to do but write, for in the country the days are long, and idleness is propitious for letter-writing. At the same time, the watchfulness and solicitude of your guardian being less interrupted by the customary engagements of the city, you will have to submit to more catechising when letters come to you. In a château, moreover, the arrival of a letter is an event. Not at all; while you may not be able to write, you may, on the other hand, receive no end of letters.

I am beginning to be accustomed to your ways, and am no longer surprised at anything you do. I beg you, however, to take pity on me, and do not put to too severe a test the unfortunate habit I have formed—I know not how—of thinking everything that you do to be right.

I recall having been somewhat too frank, perhaps, in my last letter, on the subject of my own disposition. A friend of mine, an old diplomat, and a very shrewd man, has often said to me: “Never speak ill of yourself. Your friends will always do that for you.” I begin to fear that you will interpret literally every word of disparagement I said of myself. You must understand that my cardinal virtue is modesty; I carry it to excess, and tremble lest it may prejudice you against me. Some other time, when I am more happily inspired, I will give you the exact nomenclature of all my characteristics. It will be a long list. To-day I am not feeling well, and dare not launch forth into this geometrical progression.

You can not possibly guess where I was Saturday night, and what I was doing at midnight. I was on the roof of one of the towers of Notre Dame, drinking orangeade and eating ices, in the company of four of my friends and of a matchless moon, all of us attended by an immense owl that flapped his wings around us. Paris, indeed, in the moonlight and at that hour, presents a truly beautiful picture. It resembles the cities described in the Thousand and One Nights, whose inhabitants were enchanted while they slept. Parisians, as a rule, go to bed at midnight—the more stupid they. Our party was a curious assemblage; there were four nations represented, each one having a different point of view. The tiresome part of it was that some of us felt obliged, in the presence of the moon and of the owl, to assume a sentimental tone, and to utter commonplaces. To tell the truth, everybody began gradually to talk nonsense.

I do not know why and by what association of ideas this semi-poetic evening recalls to my mind another, which was not in the least poetic. I went to a ball given by some of my young friends, to which were invited all the ballet girls of the Opera. These women are, as a rule, dull, but I have observed that in moral feeling they are superior to the men of their class. The only vice which separates them from other women is poverty. You will be singularly edified by all these rhapsodies, so I shall hasten to a close, which I should have done long ago.

Good-bye. Do not bear me a grudge for the unflattering portrait of myself which I have given you.

II

Paris.

Frankness and truth are virtues seldom esteemed by women as desirable; rather are they qualities to be avoided. For this reason you regard me as a Sardanapalus, because I attended a ball at which the ballet girls of the Opera were present. You reproach me for that evening as if it were a crime, and you reproach me for commending those poor girls as if that were a still greater crime. I repeat it, give them wealth, and thereafter only their good qualities will be seen. But an insurmountable barrier has been raised by the aristocracy between the different social classes, so that neither class may discover how much alike are the happenings on each side of the barrier. I want to tell you the story of a ballet girl that I heard in this same shocking society. In a house in the rue Saint Honoré lived a poor woman who never left the little attic room which she rented at three francs a month. She had one daughter twelve years old, who was always neatly dressed, very demure, and extremely reserved in manner. This little girl went out three afternoons in the week and returned alone at midnight. It was known that she was a chorus girl at the Opera. One day she goes down to the porter’s room and asks for a lighted candle. It is given to her. The porter’s wife, surprised not to see her come downstairs again, climbs to the garret, finds the woman dead on her wretched pallet, and the little girl occupied in burning unread an enormous quantity of letters which she was taking from a large trunk. She says: “My mother died last night, and charged me to destroy all her letters without reading them.” This child has never known her mother’s real name; she is now absolutely alone in the world, without any resource but to act the vulture, the monkey, or the devil at the Opera.

Her mother’s last word of counsel was to urge her to be prudent, and to continue to be a ballet girl. She is, moreover, very discreet, deeply religious, and it is with reluctance that she refers to her story. Tell me, please, if it is not infinitely more creditable for this little girl to lead the life she does, than for you who enjoy the singular good fortune of an irreproachable environment, and of a temperament of such refinement that it seems to me to sum up the qualities of an entire civilisation. I must tell you the truth. I can endure the society of ignoble people only at rare intervals, and then only because of an inexhaustible curiosity which I feel for every variety of the human species. I can never tolerate low society among men. To me there is something too repulsive in them, especially in our own countrymen. In Spain, however, I made friends always with the mule-drivers and the toreros. Many a time have I broken bread with people whom an Englishman would not notice for fear of losing his self-respect. I have even drunk from the same bottle with a convict. I must admit that there was no other bottle, and one must drink when he is thirsty. Do not from this imagine that I have a preference for the rabble. It is simply that I like to see other manners, other faces, and to hear another language. The ideas are always the same, and if one eliminates all that is conventional, I believe that good manners may be found elsewhere than in a drawing-room of the faubourg Saint Germain. All this is Arabic to you, and I do not know why I say it.

August 8.

I have been a long time finishing this letter. My mother has been extremely ill, and I very anxious. She is now out of danger, and I trust that in a few days she will be in perfect health. I can not endure anxiety, and while her life was in danger I was quite daft.

Adieu.

P.S.—The water-colour which I intended for you is not turning out well, and I am so dissatisfied with it that I shall probably not send it to you. Do not let this prevent you from sending me the needle-work you have made for me. Be sure to choose a trustworthy messenger. As a general rule, never take a woman as a confidante; sooner or later you will regret it. Learn also that nothing is more common than to do wrong merely for the pleasure of doing it. Abandon your optimistic ideas, and realise that we are in this world to struggle and contend with our fellows. In this connection I will tell you that a learned friend of mine, who reads hieroglyphics, says that on the Egyptian coffins were often found these two words, Life, War; which proves that I have not invented the maxim just quoted. In hieroglyphics it is expressed thus:

Again adieu.

III

Paris.

Your reproaches please me greatly. I am, indeed, predestined by the fairies. I ask myself often what I am to you, and what you are to me. To the first question I can have no reply; as for the second, I fancy that I love you as if you were a fourteen-year-old niece of whom I were the guardian. As for your exceedingly moral relative, who has so much ill to say of me, he reminds me of Thwackum, who is always saying, “Can any virtue exist without religion?” Have you read Tom Jones?—a book as immoral as all of mine together. If it has been forbidden you, I am confident you have read it. What a farce of an education is that which you are getting in England! What does it amount to? People lose their breath preaching to a young girl, and the result is that this young girl desires to know the identical immoral being for whom people flatter themselves they have given her an aversion. What an admirable story is that of the serpent! I wish Lady M—— could read this letter. Fortunately, she would faint about the tenth line.

Turning the page, I have reread what I have just written, and it seems to me that there is very little coherence and connection of ideas. That is a fault of mine, but I write just as I think, and as my thoughts are more rapid than my pen, the consequence is that I am forced to omit all the transitions. I should, perhaps, follow your example, and erase all the first page; but I prefer to resign it to you for reflection and curl-papers. I must confess, too, that just at this moment I am deeply absorbed in an affair which, I avow to my shame, dwells stubbornly in one-half of my brain, while the other half is entirely filled with you. The portrait which you draw of yourself I like tolerably well. It does not flatter you any too much, and all that I know of you pleases me prodigiously....

I am studying you with the liveliest curiosity. I have theories about the most trifling things, about gloves, about boots, about curls, etc., and I attach great importance to such things, because I have discovered that there is an actual relation between the temperament of women and the caprice (or, to express it better, the connection of ideas and the reasoning) which causes them to choose such and such a fabric. Thus, for instance, it is for me to have demonstrated that a woman who wears blue gowns is a coquette, and poses as a sentimentalist. The demonstration is easy, but it would take too long. How should you like it if I were to send you a wretchedly bad water-colour, larger than this sheet, and which could be neither rolled nor folded? Wait until I can make you a smaller one, that can be sent in a letter.

The other day I went sailing. On the river there were any number of little sail-boats, carrying all sorts of people. There was one very large boat in which were several women of questionable manners. All these boats had landed, and from the largest stepped a man about forty years old, who was amusing himself by playing on a tambourine. While I was admiring the musical talent of this creature, a woman of perhaps twenty-three, approached him, calling him a monster, telling him that she had followed him from Paris, and that if he would not allow her to join him he would repent it. All this occurred on the bank, about twenty feet from our boat. The man with the tambourine continued playing while the deserted woman was thus holding forth, and with the utmost indifference replied that he did not intend to have her in his boat; whereupon she climbed out to the boat moored farthest from the bank, and threw herself into the river, splashing us abominably. Although she had extinguished my cigar, indignation did not deter me, or my friends either, from pulling her out of the water before she had been in it long enough to swallow two glasses. The beauteous object of all this despair had not so much as budged, and murmured between his teeth, “Why rescue her, when she wished to drown herself?” We took the woman to an inn, and as it was getting late, and it was almost dinner-time, we left her to the care of the tavernkeeper’s wife.

How does it happen that the most indifferent men are the best beloved by women? This is what I asked myself as I sailed down the Seine, what I am still asking myself, and what I beg you to tell me, if you know.

Good-bye. Write to me often; let us be friends, and pardon the incoherence of my letter. Some day I will explain the reason.

IV

Mariquita de mi alma (it is thus that I should commence if we were in Granada), I received your letter in one of those moments of melancholy when one views life only through dark glasses. As your epistle is not as amiable as it might be—pardon my frankness—it has contributed not a little to the continuance of my sulky mood. I wished to answer your letter Sunday, promptly and sharply; promptly, because you had censured me in an indirect sort of way, and sharply, because I was furious with you.

I was interrupted at the first word of my letter, and this interruption prevented me from writing to you. Thank the good Lord for this, for the weather is fine to-day, and my ill-humour has become mollified to such an extent that I no longer wish to write to you save in a style of honey and sugar. I shall not quarrel with you, therefore, about thirty or forty passages in your last letter, which gave me a terrible shock, and which I am quite willing to forget. I forgive you, and with so much the more pleasure because I really believe that, in spite of my wrath, I like you better when you are pouting than in any other mood. One passage in your letter made me laugh all by myself for ten minutes. You tell me short and sweet: “My love is promised” and thus you bring on the great knock-down blow without any preliminary skirmishes.

You say you are engaged for life as you would say, “I am engaged for the quadrille.” Very well. I have apparently employed my time to advantage in discussing with you questions of love, marriage, and the like; you are still on the point of believing, or at least of saying, that when you are told to love a certain gentleman, you love him. Have you promised by a contract signed before a notary, or on vignetted paper?

When I was a school-boy I received once from a seamstress a note surmounted by two hearts aflame, united as follows:

Nothing is so fatal as engagements to those in whose behalf they are made. Do you know that if your love were already promised, I should believe confidently that it would be possible for you to love me? Why should you not love me? for you have made me no promises, since the first law of nature is to take a dislike to everything that has the appearance of an obligation. And, indeed, every obligation is in its nature irksome. In short, if I had less modesty I should come to the conclusion that if you have pledged your love to some one, you will give it to me, to whom you have promised nothing. Joking aside, and speaking of promises, since you do not care to have my water-colour, I have a strong desire to send it to you. I was dissatisfied with it, and began a copy of an infant Marguerite of Velasquez, which I wished to give you. Velasquez is not easy to copy, especially for daubers like myself. Twice I have begun my Marguerite, but now I am even more discontented with it than I was with the monk. The latter is still subject to your orders. I will send it whenever you wish, but it will not carry conveniently. Not only this, the spirits which sometimes amuse themselves by intercepting our letters might possibly take care of my picture. What reassures me is that it is so bad that no one but I could have made it, and no one but you be blamed for it. Let me know your pleasure.

I hope you will be in Paris about the middle of October, at which time I shall have two or three weeks’ leisure. I should not care to spend them in France, and for a long time I have intended to see the Rubens pictures at Antwerp, and the Art Gallery at Amsterdam. If I were sure of seeing you, however, I should renounce Rubens and Van Dyck with the greatest cheerfulness. You see that the sacrifice costs me nothing. I do not know Amsterdam. However, it is for you to decide. Here your vanity will lead you to say: “A great sacrifice, indeed, not to prefer me to those fat Flemish women, with their white caps and baskets of fish, and in a picture gallery besides!” Yes, it is a sacrifice, and a great one too. I give up the certainty, that is, the very great pleasure, of seeing the paintings of a master, to the very uncertain chance that you will compensate me. Observe, that leaving out of consideration the impossible supposition that you might not please me, if I were to prove a disappointment to you, I should have good reason to regret my works of art and my fat Flemish women.

You seem to be devoutly superstitious even. I am reminded at this moment of a pretty little Grenada girl, who, on mounting her mule to go through a mountain pass at Ronda (a spot notorious for robbers), piously kissed her thumb, and struck her breast five or six times, absolutely certain after that that the robbers would not show themselves, provided the Inglés (meaning myself, for every traveller must be an Englishman) would not swear too much by the Holy Virgin and the Saints. This shocking manner of speaking becomes necessary on bad roads in order to persuade the horses to go.

Read “Tristram Shandy.” I should enjoy immensely your opinion of the story of that person. You are unjust and jealous—two admirable qualities in a woman, two faults in a man. I have them both. You ask me about the affair which preoccupies me. To tell you that, it would be necessary to describe my life and my character, of which no one has the least idea, because I have never yet found any one who inspired me with sufficient confidence to tell it. After we have met often we may perhaps become good friends, and you will understand me. To have a friend to whom I could express all my thoughts, past and present, would be to me the greatest blessing. I am becoming sad, and I must not end this letter in such a mood. I am consumed with the desire to have an answer from you. Be kind, and do not make me wait long.

Good-bye. Do not let us quarrel again, and let us be friends. With respect I kiss the hand which you extend to me in sign of peace.

V

September 25.

Your letter found me ill, and very dreary, busily engaged with some extremely troublesome affairs, so that I have not had time to take care of myself. I have, I think, inflammation of the lungs, which makes me exceedingly irritable. In a few days, however, I propose to take myself in hand and get well.

I have decided not to leave Paris in October, in the hope that you will come then. You shall see me or not, at your pleasure. It will be your fault if you do not. You mention particular reasons which prevent you from trying to meet me. I respect secrets, and do not ask your motives; only, I beg you to tell me, really and truly, if you have any. Are you not moved, rather, by some childish notion? Perhaps some one has read you a lecture on my account, and you are still under its spell. You should have no fear of me. Your natural prudence, doubtless, counts for much in your disinclination to see me. Be reassured, I shall not fall in love with you. A few years ago that might have happened; now I am too old, and I have been too unfortunate. I can never fall in love again, because my illusions have caused me many desengaños.

When I went to Spain I was on the point of falling in love. It was one of the beautiful acts of my life. The woman who was the cause of my voyage never suspected it. Had I remained, I might have committed, possibly, a great blunder, that of offering a woman worthy of enjoying every happiness that one may have on earth, in exchange for the loss of all that was dear to her, an affection which I realised was far inferior to the sacrifice that she would probably have made. You recall my maxim, “Love excuses all things, but one must be sure that it is love.” You may be sure that this precept is more rigid than those of your Methodist friends. In conclusion, I shall be charmed to see you. You, perhaps, may gain a real friend, and I, it may be, shall find in you what I have long sought—a woman with whom I shall not be in love, but one whom I may have for a confidante. We shall both gain, probably, by a closer acquaintance. Still, you must act as your lofty sense of prudence dictates.

My monk is ready. At the first opportunity, therefore, I shall send you the picture framed. The child Marguerite, still unfinished and too badly begun to be ever completed, will remain just as it is, and will serve as a blotting-pad for a sketch I shall do for you when I have time. I am dying of curiosity to see the surprise you have in store for me, but in vain do I rack my brain to guess it. When writing to you I omit all transitions, with me a very necessary trick of style.

You will find this letter, I fear, terribly disconnected. The reason is, that while writing one sentence another comes to my mind, and this occasions a third before the second one is finished. I am suffering greatly to-night. If you have any influence Above, try to obtain for me a little health, or, failing in that, resignation; for I am the most impatient invalid in the world, and treat my best friends abominably.

Stretched on my couch, I think of you, of our mysterious acquaintance, with pleasure, and it seems to me that I should be very happy to chat with you in the same desultory way that I write; besides, there is this advantage, that words vanish, but writing remains. I am not tormented, however, by the thought that some day my words, either living or posthumous, may be published. Good-bye. Let me have your sympathy. I would I had the courage to tell you a thousand things that make life sad. But how can I, when you are so far away? When are you coming? Again good-bye. If your heart prompts you, you have an abundance of time to write to me.

P.S.—September 26.—I am even more low-spirited than I was yesterday. I suffer tortures, but if you have never had gastritis you can have no conception of what it means to suffer pain that is indefinite and at the same time intense. It has this peculiarity, that it affects the entire nervous system. I should like to be in the country with you. I am sure you would cure me. Good-bye. If I die this year, you will be sorry that you did not know me better.

VI

Do you know that you are sometimes very kind? I do not say this as a reproach veiled by a cold compliment, but I should be glad indeed to receive frequent letters like your last one. Unfortunately, you are not always so charitably inclined towards me. I have not replied earlier, because your letter was only delivered to me last night, on my return from a short trip. I spent four days in absolute solitude, without seeing a man, much less a woman, for I do not call men and women certain bipeds who are trained to fetch food and drink when they are ordered to do so. During my retreat I made the most dismal reflections about myself and my future, about my friends, and so on. If I had had the wit to wait for your letter it would have given quite another turn to my thoughts. “I should have carried away happiness enough to last me at least a week.”

The way in which you came down on that worthy Mr. V. is delightful. Your courage pleases me immensely. I should never have supposed you capable of such capricho, and I admire you all the more for it. It is true that the remembrance of your splendid black eyes counts for something in my admiration. However, old as I am, I am almost insensible to beauty. I say to myself that “it amounts to nothing”; but I assure you that when I heard a man of very fastidious taste say you were very pretty, I could not repress a feeling of sadness. This is the reason (but first let me assure you that I am not the least bit in love with you): I am horribly jealous, jealous of my friends, and it grieves me to think that your beauty exposes you to the attentions of a lot of men incapable of appreciating you, and who admire in you only those things for which I care the least.

In fact, I am in a beastly humour when I think of that ceremony which you are to attend. Nothing makes me more melancholy than a wedding. The Turks, who bargain for a woman while they examine her as they would a fat sheep, are better than we, who have glossed over this vile trade with a varnish of hypocrisy which, alas! is only too transparent. I have asked myself often what I should find to say to a wife on the first day of my marriage, and I have thought of nothing possible, unless it were a compliment on her night-cap. Happily, the devil will be extremely clever if he ever entraps me into such an entertainment. The part which the woman plays is much easier than that of the man. On such an occasion she models her conduct on Racine’s Iphigenia; but if she is at all observant, what a lot of droll things she must see! You must tell me whether the reception was beautiful. All the men will pay you attention and favour you with allusions to domestic happiness. When the Andalusians are angry, they say: Mataria el sol á puñaladas si no fuese por miedo de dejar el mundo á oscuras!

Since September 28, my birthday, an uninterrupted succession of petty misfortunes have assailed me. Besides this, the pain in my chest is worse and I suffer great distress. I shall delay my trip to England until the middle of November. If you are unwilling to see me in London, I must abandon the hope, but I am anxious to see the elections. I shall overtake you soon after in Paris, where chance may bring us together, even if your whim persists in keeping us apart. All your reasons are pitiful, and are not worth the trouble to refute, and all the more since you yourself know that they are worthless.

You are joking, certainly, when you say so pleasantly that you are afraid of me. You are aware that I am ugly, and have a capricious temper, that I am always absent-minded, and often, when in pain, very irritating and disagreeable. What is there in all that to disturb you? You will never fall in love with me, so rest easy. Your consoling predictions can never be realised. You are not a witch. Now the truth is that my chances of death have increased this year. Do not be anxious about your letters. All letters and papers found in my room shall be burned after my death; but to plague you, I shall bequeath you in my will a manuscript continuation of the Guzla, which amused you so much.

You have the qualities of both an angel and a devil, but many more of the latter. You call me a tempter. Dare, if you will, to say that this title does not apply to you far more than to me. Have you not thrown a bait to me, a poor little fish? and now that you have me caught on the end of your hook you keep me dangling between the sky and the sea as long as it amuses you; then, when you grow tired of the game, you will cut the line, I shall drop with the hook in my mouth, and the fisherman will be nowhere to be found.

I appreciate your frankness in confessing that you read the letter which Mr. V. wrote me and entrusted to your charge. I guessed it, indeed, for since the time of Eve all women are alike in that respect. I wish the letter had been more interesting; but I suppose that, in spite of his spectacles, you consider Mr. V. a man of good taste. I am out of sorts because I am suffering.

I am reminded of your promise to give me a schizzo—a promise you would never have given if I had not begged for it—and I feel in better humour. I await the schizzo with the greatest patience. Adieu, niña de mis ojos; I promise never to fall in love with you. I do not want to be in love ever again, but I should like to have a woman friend. If I should see you often, and you are all I believe you to be, I should become very fond of you, in a truly platonic way. Try, therefore, to arrange it so that we may meet when you come to Paris. Shall I be compelled to wait many long days for a reply? Good-bye again. Pity me, for I am very downcast, and I have a thousand reasons for being so.

VII

Lady M. told me last night that you were going to be married. This being so, burn my letters. I shall burn yours, and then good-bye. You already know my principles on this question. They do not allow me to continue in friendly relations with a married woman whom I knew as a young girl, with a widow whom I knew as a married woman. I have observed that when the civil status of a woman has changed, one’s relations with her have changed also, and always for the worse. In brief, right or wrong, I can not endure that my friends should marry. Therefore, if you are going to be married, let us forget each other. I beg of you not to have recourse to one of your usual evasions, but to answer me frankly.

I declare that since September 28 I have suffered disappointments and vexations of every description. Your marriage was only another of the fatalities that were to fall on me.

One night not long ago, being unable to sleep, I reviewed in my mind all the vexations which have overwhelmed me during the last fortnight, and I found for them all but one compensation, which was your amiable letter, and your equally amiable promise to make me a sketch. Yet now I wish I could stab the sun, as the Andalusians say.

Mariquita de mi vida, (let me call you so until your marriage), I had a superb stone, finely cut, brilliant, sparkling, in every point perfect. I believed it to be a diamond, which I would not have exchanged for that of the Grand Mogul. Not so at all! It turns out to be but an imitation. A friend of mine, who is a chemist, has just analysed it for me. Fancy my disappointment. I have spent a great deal of time thinking of this imitation diamond, and of my good fortune in having found it. Now I must spend as much time, and more even, in persuading myself that it was not a genuine stone.

All this is only a parable. I took dinner the other evening with the false diamond, and made but a surly appearance. When I am angry I am rather skilful with the rhetorical figure called irony, and so I extolled the good qualities of the diamond in my most bombastic style and with frigid composure. I do not know, I am sure, why I tell you all this, especially since we are soon to forget each other. Meanwhile, I love you still, and commend myself to your prayers—“nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” etc.

Next Friday your picture will leave by mail, and should certainly reach London by Sunday. You might send for it Tuesday at Mr. V.’s, Pall-Mall.

Forgive the insanity of this letter; my mind is distracted with gloomy thoughts.

VIII

My dear platonic Friend: We are becoming very affectionate. You say to me, Amigo de mi alma, which from a woman’s lips is very sweet. You give me no news of your health. In your former letter you told me that my platonic friend was ill, and you should have known that I was anxious. Be more definite in future. It is all very well for you to complain of my reticence, you who are mystery incarnate! What more will you have on the story of the diamond, unless it is the name? Details, perhaps; but they would be tiresome to write, and some day they may amuse you, when we shall find nothing to say to each other, seated in our arm-chairs on opposite sides of the chimney corner.

Listen to the dream that I had two nights ago, and if you are sincere, interpret it for me. Methought we were both in Valencia, in a beautiful garden where there was an abundance of oranges, pomegranates, and other fruits. You were seated upon a bench, resting against a hedge. Opposite was a wall about six feet in height, separating this garden from another garden on a much lower level. I was standing facing you, and it seemed to me that we were speaking to each other in the Valencian tongue. Nota bene, that I am able to understand Valencian with much difficulty. What sort of a deuced language is it that one speaks in a dream, when one speaks a language that he does not know? For lack of something else to do, and from habit, I went and stood on a rock, looking over into the garden below. There I saw a bench also with its back against the wall, and seated on this bench was a Valencian gardener playing the guitar, and my diamond was listening. This sight put me instantly in a bad humour, but at first I gave no sign of this. The diamond raised her head, and seemed astonished to see me, but she did not start, or appear otherwise disconcerted.

After a time I stepped down from the stone, and said to you, casually and without mentioning the diamond, that it would be a great joke to throw a big stone over the top of the wall. This stone was very heavy. You were eager to help me, and without asking any questions (which is not natural to you), by dint of pushing we succeeded in placing the stone on the top of the wall, and we were making ready to push it over, when the wall itself gave way and crumbled, and we both fell with the stone and the débris of the wall. I do not know what happened then, for I awoke. That you may understand the scene better, I enclose a drawing of it. I was unable to see the gardener’s face, which is most exasperating.

You are very kind. I have said this to you frequently of late. It was very kind of you to have answered the question that I asked you recently. I need not tell you that your reply pleased me. You have even said, unconsciously, perhaps, several things that have given me pleasure, and especially that the husband of a woman who resembled you would have your sincere sympathy. I can readily believe you, and will add that no one could be more unfortunate unless it were a man who loved you.

You must be cold and sarcastic in your perverse moods, with an insuperable pride which forbids you to acknowledge when you are in the wrong. Add to this your energetic temperament, which compels you to disdain tears and complaints. When in the course of time and of events we become friends, it shall be seen which of us knows better how to torment the other. Only to think of it makes my hair stand on end. Have I interpreted correctly your but? Rest assured that, notwithstanding your resolutions, the threads of our lives are too closely intermingled for us to fail to find each other some day or other. I am dying to see and talk with you. It seems to me that I should be perfectly happy if I knew that I should see you this evening.

By the way, you are wrong to suspect Mr. V. of undue curiosity. Even if it were equal to yours, which is not possible, Mr. V. is a Cato, and under no consideration would he break a seal. Therefore send him the schizzo under cover, and have no fear of any indiscretion on his part. I should like to see you as you were writing, Amigo de mi alma. When you are having your photograph taken for me, say those words to yourself, instead of “prunes and prisms,” as ladies say when they wish to give their mouth a pleasant expression.

Try and arrange it so that we may meet without any secrecy and as good friends do. You will be distressed, no doubt, to learn that I am not at all well and am horribly bored. Do come soon to Paris, dear Mariquita, and make me fall in love with you. Then I shall be no longer lonely, and in compensation I shall make you very unhappy by my whims. For some time your writing has been very careless and your letters short. I am convinced that you have no love for any one, and never will have any. However, you understand well enough the theory of love.

Good-bye. You have my best wishes for your health, for your happiness, that you may not marry, that you may come to Paris—in short, that we may become good friends.

IX

Mariquita de mi alma: I am grieved to learn of your indisposition. When this letter reaches you I hope you will have fully recovered your health, and that you will be in a condition to write me longer letters. Your last one was maddeningly brief and stiff, a style of writing to which you formerly accustomed me, but which is now more annoying than you can imagine. Write me a long letter, and tell me all kinds of pleasant things. What is your malady? Have you some vexation to endure, or is it a sorrow? In your last note there are several mysterious phrases, as all your phrases are which intimated this. But between ourselves, I do not believe you have ever known the luxury of that organ called the heart. You have troubles of the mind, pleasures of the mind; but the organ known as the heart is developed only about the twenty-fifth year of age, in the 46th degree of latitude.

You will knit your beautiful black brows at this, and say, “The saucy man doubts that I have a heart!” for this nowadays is the great assumption. Since so many novels and poems of passion, so called, have been written, all women affect to have a heart. Wait a little while. When you have really discovered your heart you will tell me about it; you will recall regretfully these good days when you were ruled only by the mind, and you will realise that the vexations you now suffer are mere pin-pricks compared to the dagger-thrusts that shall overwhelm you when the days of passion shall have come.

I have been grumbling about your letter, but it really contains some very agreeable news: that is, the definite promise, graciously given, to send me your photograph. This gives me great pleasure, not only because I shall then know you better, but especially because it will be a token of your growing confidence in me. I see that I am making progress in your esteem, and congratulate myself. When am I to receive this portrait? Will you give it to me yourself? If so, I will come to receive it. Or will you give it to Mr. V., who will send it to me with all due discretion? Have no fear of either him or his wife. I should prefer to receive it from your own white hand.

I shall start for London early next month. I am going to see the election. I shall also eat some whitebait at Blackwall, look over the cartoons of Hampton Court, and then return to Paris. If I were to see you it would make me very happy, but I dare not hope for it. However that may be, if you will send the sketch under cover to Mr. V. just as you do your letters, I shall receive it promptly, for, if nothing happens, I shall be in London the 8th of December.

I have censured your curiosity and indiscretion in opening Mr. V.’s letter, but to tell you the truth you have some faults that I like, and your curiosity is one of them. If we were to meet often, I am afraid you would take a dislike to me, and that the opposite would happen with me. At this moment I am thinking of the expression on your face. It is a little severe, that of a lioness, though tame.

Adieu. I send a thousand kisses to your mysterious feet.

X

By all means, by all means, send Mr. V. what you have for so long a time led me to expect. Enclose a letter too, a long one, for if you were to send a letter to Paris I should probably cross it on my way. Caution Mr. V. to take care of the letter and the package, and tell him that I shall call for them in person the last of next week. What would be on your part even more friendly, and what you do not suggest in your letter, would be to tell me when and where I might see you. I am not counting on this, however, and I know you too well to expect any such proof of your courage. I rely on chance only, which may give me some talisman or clew.

I am writing to you lying on a couch, suffering tortures; colour that of a sun-scorched meadow. I refer to my own colour, not that of the couch. You must know that the sea makes me very ill, and that the glad waters of the dark blue sea are pleasant to me only when I watch them from the shore. The first time I went to England I was so ill that it was a fortnight before I regained my usual colour, which is that of the pale horse of the Apocalypse. One day when I was dining opposite to Madam V., she exclaimed suddenly, “Until to-day I thought you were an Indian.” Do not be frightened, and do not take me for a ghost.

Forgive me for referring so often to the diamond. What must be the feelings of a man who is not a connoisseur in gems, to whom the jewellers have said, “This stone is an imitation,” and who nevertheless sees it sparkle brilliantly; who sometimes says to himself, “Suppose the jewellers are not good judges of diamonds! Suppose they are mistaken, or else wish to deceive me!” I look at my diamond from time to time (as seldom as I can), and every time I see it it seems to me genuine in every respect. What a pity that I am unable myself to make a conclusive chemical analysis! What do you think about it? If I could see you, I should explain what is obscure in this matter, and you would give me some wise advice; or, better still, you would make me forget my diamond, genuine or false, for there is no diamond that can stand comparison with two lovely black eyes.

Good-bye. I have a terrible pain in my left elbow, on which I am leaning to write to you; besides, you do not deserve three closely written pages. You send me only a few lines, carelessly written, and when you write three lines two of them are certain to throw me in a rage.

XI

You are charming, dear Mariquita, too charming even. I have just received the schizzo, and I now possess both your portrait and your confidence, a double happiness. You were in an agreeable mood the day you wrote, for your letter was long and kind, but it has one fault, that is, it is indefinite. Shall I see you, or not? That is the question. I know well enough how it may be solved, but you do not want to come to a decision. You are, as you will be all your life, vacillating between your own temperament and the habits you acquired in the convent. That is the cause of all the trouble.

I swear to you that if you will not permit me to call and see you, I shall go to Madam D. and ask her to give me some news of you. In this connection, Madam D. might give you a satisfactory proof of my discretion, for I even resisted the desire which made my fingers tingle to open the package containing the picture. Applaud me.

Why are you unwilling that I should see you on the promenade, for example, or, better still, at the British Museum or the Ingerstein Gallery? I have a friend with me who is exceedingly curious about the large package which I untied while his back was turned, and also about the change in my spirits due to its arrival. I have not told him a word that approaches the truth, but I think he is on the scent.

Good-bye. I wished to tell you of the safe arrival of the picture, and of the very great pleasure it has given me. Let us write frequently in London, even if we are not to see each other there.

XII

London, December 10.

Tell me, in the name of God, “if you are of God,” querida Mariquita, why you have not answered my letter. Your letter before the last, and especially the picture which accompanied it, threw me into such a flutter that the note I wrote you on the spot did not have any too much common sense. Now that I am calmer, and have had several days in London to refresh my mind, I shall try to reason with you.

Why do you not wish to see me? No one of your friends knows me, and my visit would seem entirely natural. Your principal motive seems to be the dread of doing something improper, as they say here. I do not take seriously what you say concerning your fear of losing your illusions upon closer acquaintance with me. If this were the real ground of your hesitation, you would be the first woman, the first human being, whom such a consideration prevented from gratifying her inclination or her curiosity.

Let us consider the impropriety of it. Is the thing improper in itself? No, for nothing is more open and above-board. You know in advance that I shall not eat you. The thing, then, is improper, admitting that it is improper, only in the eyes of society. Observe in passing that this word society makes us miserable from the day when we put on clothes that are uncomfortable, because society so orders it, until the day of our death....

In sending me your portrait, it seems to me that you gave me a proof of your faith in my discretion. Why, then, believe in it no longer? A man’s good judgment, and mine in particular, is the greater the more is expected of him. This granted, and being fully convinced of my discretion, you may see me, and society will be none the wiser, consequently it can not exclaim at the impropriety. I will even add, with my hand on my heart—that is, on my left side—that so far as I am concerned I see not the slightest impropriety in it. I will say more: if this correspondence is to continue without our ever meeting, it becomes the most absurd thing in the world. All these thoughts I leave to your reflection.

If I were vainer, I should rejoice at what you say of my diamond. But we can never fall in love—with each other, I mean. Our acquaintance did not begin in a manner to lead to that point: it is far too romantic for that. As for the diamond, my travelling companion, while smoking his cigar, spoke of it without knowing my interest in the matter, and said some very deplorable things. He seems to have no doubt of its falseness. Dear Mariquita, you say you would never wish to be a “crown diamond,” and you are quite right. You are worth more than that. I offer you a sincere friendship, which, I hope, may some day be of value to us both.

Good-bye.

XIII

Paris, February, 1842.

An hour ago I read your letter, which has been on my table ever since Tuesday, concealed under a pile of papers. Since you did not disdain my gifts, I send you some conserves of roses, jessamine, and bergamot. You might offer a jar of it to Madame de C., with my best respects. It seems that I once offered you a pair of Turkish slippers, and you have persisted in refusing them, so that I should like to send them to you anyway. But since my return I have been robbed. No sign of any slippers; I can not find them high or low. Will you accept this instead? Perhaps this Turkish mirror will please you better; for you seem to me to be even more coquettish than you were in the year of grace 1840. It was in the month of December, and you wore striped silk stockings. That is all that I remember.

It is for you to decide the protocol of which you speak. You do not believe in my gray hair. Here is a sample in proof of it.

I give nothing without expecting a return. Before you go to Naples, you will be good enough to take my directions and to bring me back what I shall tell you. I might give you a letter to the director of the Pompeiian excavations, if you are interested in such things.

You make of your precious self such a dazzling portrait that I see the time of our next meeting postponed to the Greek Kalends. Allah kerim! I am writing in the midst of such an infernal racket that I do not know exactly what I am saying. I have a great many things to say, however, about ourselves, which I shall defer until after I have heard from you. Meanwhile, good-bye, and preserve that splendid bearing, that radiant countenance, which I admired.

XIV

Paris, Saturday, March, 1842.

For two hours I have been trying to decide whether I should write to you. My pride offers many reasons why I should not do so, but although you are perfectly sure, I hope, of the pleasure your letter gave me, I declare I can not refrain from telling you so.

So you are rich; so much the better. I congratulate you. Rich, which is, interpreted, free. Your friend, who had such a happy inspiration, must have been somewhat of an Auld Robin Gray; he was evidently in love with you. You will never confess it, because you are too fond of mystery; but I will forgive you; we write to each other too seldom to quarrel. Why should you not go to Rome and to Naples to enjoy the pictures and the sunshine? You are capable of appreciating Italy, and you will return richer in impressions and ideas.

I do not advise you to visit Greece. Your skin is not tough enough to resist the multitude of hideous creatures that prey on people there. Speaking of Greece, since you take such good care of what is given you, here is a blade of grass which I plucked on the hill of Anthela at Thermopylæ, the place where the last of the three hundred died. This little flower has in its constituent atoms probably a few of the molecules of the late Leonidas. I recollect, besides, that on this very spot, as I lay stretched upon a pile of straw in front of the guard-house (what a profanation!), I spoke of my youth to my friend Ampère, and said that among the tender remembrances which I had preserved there was but one in which there was no touch of bitterness. I was thinking at the time of our beautiful youth. Pray keep my foolish flower.

Tell me, should you like some more substantial souvenir of the Orient? Unfortunately, I have given away all the beautiful things that I brought back with me. I could give you quantities of sandals, but you would wear them for others, thank you. If you wish some conserves of roses and jessamine, I still have a little left, but let me know at once, or I shall eat them all. We hear from each other so seldom that we have a great many things to say concerning ourselves. Here is my history:

I visited my dear Spain again in the fall of 1840. I spent two months in Madrid, where I witnessed a ridiculous revolution, several superb bull-fights, and the triumphal entry of Espartero, which was the most comical parade I ever saw. I was a guest in the home of an intimate friend who is almost like a dear sister to me. In the morning I went into Madrid, and returned to dine in the country with six women, the oldest of whom was thirty-six. In consequence of the revolution I was the only man at liberty to come and go freely, so that these six unfortunates had no other protector. They spoiled me terribly. I did not fall in love with any of them, as I should perhaps have done. While I did not deceive myself as to the advantages which I owed to the revolution, I found it very agreeable, nevertheless, to be a sultan, even ad honores.

On my return to Paris I treated myself to the innocent pleasure of printing a book for private circulation. There were only made a hundred and fifty copies, with superb paper, illustrations, etc., which I presented to people whom I liked. I should offer you this rare book if you were worthy of it; but I must warn you that it is a historical and pedantic work, so bristling with Greek and Latin, nay, even with Oscan (do you even know what Oscan is?), that you could not so much as nibble at it.

Last summer I happened to fall on a little money. My minister gave me three months’ holiday, and I spent five running about from Malta to Athens and from Ephesus to Constantinople. During these five months I was not bored for five minutes. What would have become of you, to whom I was once such an object of terror, if you had met me during my Asiatic journey, with a belt of pistols, a huge sword, and—would you believe it?—a moustache that extended beyond my ears! Without intending any flattery, I should have struck fear into the heart of the boldest brigand of melodrama. At Constantinople I saw the Sultan, in patent-leather boots, and a frock-coat, and again, afterwards, covered with diamonds in the procession of the Baïram. On the same occasion, a handsome woman, on whose toe I had stepped by accident, slapped me severely and called me a giaour. This constituted my only intercourse with the Turkish beauties. At Athens, and in Asia, I saw the most splendid monuments in the world, and the loveliest landscapes possible to imagine.

The only drawback consisted in fleas and gnats as big as larks; consequently I never slept. Meanwhile, I have grown old. My passport describes me as having turtle locks, which is a pleasant Oriental metaphor for saying all sorts of disagreeable things. Picture to yourself your friend as quite gray. And you, querida, have you changed? I am waiting impatiently until you become less pretty, so that I may see you. In two or three years from now, when you write to me, tell me what you are doing and when we are to see each other. Your “respectful remembrance” made me laugh, and also that you should presume to dispute its place in my heart with Ionic and Corinthian columns.

In the first place, I do not care for any but the Doric, and there are no columns, not even excepting those of the Parthenon, which can be compared to the memory of an old friendship. Good-bye; go to Italy, and be happy. I start to-day for Evreux, on a matter of business, expecting to return Monday night. If you wish to eat rose leaves, say so; but I warn you there is only a spoonful left for you.

XV

Paris, Monday night, March, 1842.

I have just received your letter, which has put me in a bad humour. So it is your satanic pride which has kept you from seeing me. It is not for me to reproach you, however, for I think I saw you the other day, and was restrained from speaking to you by a feeling quite as paltry. You say you are better than you were two years ago. It is very well for you to say that. I admit that you are more beautiful, but, on the other hand, you seem to have absorbed a good dose of selfishness and hypocrisy. These may be very useful, but they are not qualities for one to brag about. As for me, I have become neither better nor worse; I am not more of a hypocrite than I was, and I may be wrong. Certain it is that I am not loved more on this account.

Since this purse was not embroidered by your own fair hand, what do you wish me to do with it? You ought, indeed, to give me some of your own work; my mirror and my conserves deserve that much. You might at least have told me whether you received them. When you go to Italy, and pass through Paris, you will probably not find me here. Where shall I be? The devil only knows. It is not impossible that I may meet you at the Studj; but then, again, I may go to Saragossa to see that woman of whom you say that you are worth as much as she. As for a sister, there will be no other than herself. Tell me, therefore, and that before you leave for Paris, when you expect to go to Naples, and whether you will take charge of a volume for M. Buonuicci, the Director of the Pompeiian excavations. When I go away I shall leave this volume either with Madame de C. or elsewhere.

I recall having seen, a long time ago, a Madame de C. at a house where there were some theatricals, in which I played the part of the fool. Ask her if she remembers me.

Good-bye now, and for a long time, no doubt. I am sorry not to have seen you. Write to me now and then. It will always be a great pleasure to hear from you, even though you continue the beautiful system of hypocrisy upon which you have entered so triumphantly. I will commend you to Buonuicci, you and your society, as greatly interested in archæology. You will be pleased with his cordiality.

XVI

Paris, Saturday, May 14, 1842.

You will know, in the first place, that I am not burned to death. “The railway accident on the left bank of the Seine!” It is thus that we have begun our letters in Paris for the last four days. In the next place, I will say that your letter has given me a great deal of pleasure. I found it here on my return from a short trip I have just taken on business; that is why I have been so long in replying. To be frank—and you are aware that I have not yet overcome this fault—I will admit that you have become much more beautiful physically, but not morally. You have an exquisite complexion, and lovely hair, to which I paid more attention than to your bonnet; and this was probably worthy of notice, since you seemed irritated at my failure to appreciate it. But I have never been able to distinguish lace from calico. You still have a sylphlike figure, and, although I am somewhat blasé concerning black eyes, I have never seen any so large in Constantinople or in Smyrna.

Now comes the reverse of the medal. In many respects you have remained a child, and you have become a hypocrite in the bargain. You have not learned how to conceal your first impulses, but you think you can reconcile them by having recourse to a variety of petty means. What do you expect to gain thereby? Do not forget that great and beautiful maxim of Jonathan Swift: That a lie is too good a thing to be lavished about! Your magnanimous idea of being severe on yourself will carry you far, no doubt, and a few years hence you will find yourself in the happy condition of the Trappist, who, after torturing himself again and again, should discover one day that, after all, heaven has no existence.

I do not know to what promise you refer, and there are also many other obscure passages in your letter. We can never bear the same relations to each other that exist between Madame de X. and myself; the first condition in the attitude between a brother and sister being unlimited confidence, and in this respect Madame de X. has spoiled me.

I am silly enough to grieve over that scarf-pin, but I am consoled at the thought that you also are sorry for it. This is still another beautiful trait in your character. How flattered your stoicism must have been at this victory over yourself! You imagine that you are proud, but I regret to tell you that what you think is pride is only the petty vanity which one would expect in a religious temperament. It is the fashion nowadays to preach. Shall you follow it? That would be the finishing stroke. I must drop this subject, for it always puts me in a bad humour.

I think I shall not go to Saragossa. I may go possibly to Florence; but I have quite decided to spend two months in the south of France, examining churches and Roman ruins. We may run across each other, perhaps, in some temple or circus. I advise you strongly to go straight to Naples. If you should have to wait five or six hours at Leghorn, however, you might employ them better by going to Pisa to see the Campo Santo. I advise you to see The Dead, by Orcagna, the Vergonzoso, and an antique bust of Julius Caesar. At Civita Vecchia you need see only M. Bucci, from whom you will want to buy some very old gems. You must give him my compliments. Then you will go on to Naples. You will stop at The Victoria, where you will spend several days drinking in the air, and watching the sky and the sea. You will go now and then to visit the studios. M. Buonuicci will take you to Pompeii. You will go to Paestum, and there you must think of me. When you stand in the temple of Neptune, you may say to yourself that you have seen Greece.

From Naples you will go to Rome, where you will spend a month persuading yourself that it is useless to try to see it all, because you shall return there in the future. Then you will go to Florence, and remain there ten days. After that you will do what you like. When you come to Paris, you will find the book for M. Buonuicci and my final instructions. At that time I shall probably be at Arles or at Orange. If you should stop there, be sure and inquire for me, and I will show you an ancient theatre, which will not interest you especially.

You promised me something in return for my Turkish mirror. I rely implicitly on your memory. Ah, I have great news for you! The first of the forty Academicians to die will occasion me to make thirty-nine calls. Of course I shall be as awkward as possible, and no doubt I shall make thirty-nine enemies. It would take too long to explain the reasons for this attack of ambition. Enough that the Academy is now the goal of my aspirations.

Good-bye. I will write again before leaving. Be happy, but bear in mind this maxim, that one should never do foolish things unless they please you. Perhaps the precept of M. de Talleyrand is more to your taste, that one should beware of first impulses, because they are usually honest.

XVII

Paris, June 22, 1842.

Your letter has been tardy in coming, and I became impatient. I must reply at once to the principal points. First, I received your purse. It exhaled a most aristocratic perfume, and is very pretty. If you embroidered it yourself, it does you credit. But I have recognised in it your newly acquired taste for the practical: in the first place, it is a purse to hold money; next, you valued it at a hundred francs at the stage-coach. It would have been more poetical to declare that it was worth one or two stars. All the same, I prize it quite as highly. I will put my medals in it. I should have cared more for it if you had condescended to put in it a few lines from your fair hand.

Secondly, I do not care for your pheasants. You offer them in a disagreeable fashion, and, besides, you say unpleasant things to me about my Turkish conserves. It is you who have the taste of a heretic, if you are unable to appreciate what the houris eat.

I believe I have answered everything that was sensible in your letter. I will not quarrel about the rest. I abandon you to your own conscience, which, I am sure, is sometimes even more severe than I, whom you accuse of harshness and indifference. The hypocrisy which you practise so well in sport, will play you a trick some day—that is, it will become natural to you. As for coquetry, the inseparable companion of the horrid vice which you extol, you have always indulged in it. It became you very well when it was softened by frankness, warm-heartedness, and imagination, but now—now, what shall I say?

You have beautiful raven hair, a lovely blue cashmere, and you are always charming when you wish to be. Say that I do not spoil you! As for that essence of which you speak, it is your own kindness which you thus designate. I like that word essence; yes, the real essence of roses, which is always frozen like that of Adrianople. I will tell you this Oriental story.

There was once a dervish who seemed to a baker to be a saint. The baker one day promised to give him white bread the rest of his life. At this the dervish was enchanted. But after awhile the baker said to him, “We agreed on brown bread, did we not? I have first-class brown bread. It is my specialty, is brown bread.” The dervish replied, “I have already more brown bread than I can eat, but——”

Right here my cat jumped on the table, and I have had all I could do to keep her from lying down on my paper. She has made me forget the rest of the story, which is a pity, for it was very pretty. Do you know that, with my other air-castles, I have built this one: to meet you in Marseilles in September, to show you the lions there, and have you eat figs and fish soup. But I am obliged to be in Paris by August 15, to write a report for my minister; consequently, you will eat fish soup by yourself, and you will visit the Museum and the caves of Saint-Victor without me. On the other hand, when you reach Paris you may, if you like, receive from my own hand the directions I have made for your trip to Italy.

Since your wishes always are realised, I pray you humbly to wish that I may become an Academician. This would be a great gratification to me, provided that you were not present at my reception. However, you have abundant time for the realisation of your wishes. It will be necessary for an epidemic to break out among those gentlemen before my chances are advanced; and to improve them, I should be obliged to borrow a little of that hypocrisy in which you are now so skilled. I am too old to reform; if I should try, I should be still worse than I am at present.

I am curious to know what you think of me, but how shall I ever find it out? You will never tell me, either the best or the worst that you think. Formerly I had not much of an opinion of my precious self, but now I have a little more self-esteem; not that I think I have improved, but it is the world that has grown worse.

In a week I start for Arles, where I intend to drive out a lot of beggars who live in the old theater. A fine occupation, is it not? It would be kind of you, before I go, to send me a letter brimful of sweet things. I am fond of being spoiled; besides, I am horribly sad and discouraged. I must tell you that I am spending my evenings revising my books, which are to be reprinted. I find them very immoral, and sometimes stupid. I am trying to reduce the immorality and the stupidity without going to too much trouble. The consequence is, a bad attack of the blue devils. I say good-bye, and kiss your hands most humbly. Can you guess what I found among my papers? A short blue thread, twice knotted. I have put it away in the purse.

XVIII

Châlon-sur-Saône, June 30, 1842.

You guessed correctly the end of the story: the dervish was imposed upon by the baker, but, all the same, the holy man did not like brown bread.

I am in a city which is particularly odious to me, alone in an inn, listening to a frightful south-east wind. It parches everything it touches, and the harmonies produced as it whistles down the corridors are enough to bring the devil up to earth. The result is that I am furious with all nature. I am writing to you in order to cheer me a little, and I am comforted by the thought that in your approaching journey you will have many such days as this. I saw in Saint Vincent’s church an exceedingly pretty young girl making stations. Isn’t that what you call the prayers, or something of the sort, that are said before a series of pictures representing the principal scenes of the Passion? Her mother was near, watching over her with strict attention. While taking notes on ancient Byzantine columns, I asked myself what this young girl could have done to merit such a penance. The case must have been one of deep gravity.

Have you become deeply pious, following the general fashion of the day? You must be pious for the same reason that you must wear a blue cashmere. I should be sorry, however, if this were so. Our piety here in France is repugnant to me. It is a sort of mediocre philosophy, which springs not from the heart, but from the mind. When you have seen the devotion of the common people in Italy, you will agree with me, I hope, that theirs is the only genuine religion; only one must be born beyond the Alps or the Pyrenees to believe this.

You can not conceive of the disgust which I feel for our society of the present day. One would suppose that it has tried in every way possible to add to the burden of suffering necessary to the management of society. I shall await your return from Italy; you will have seen there a state of society where, on the contrary, everything contributes to render existence more agreeable and more tolerable. We shall then resume our discussions on the subject of hypocrisy, and it is possible that we shall come to an understanding.

I have spent almost the entire winter studying mythology from old Latin and Greek archives. It has proved to be extremely entertaining, and if there should ever come into your head the desire to know the record of the thoughts of men, which is vastly more interesting than the history of their deeds, inquire of me, and I will recommend three or four books for your reading which will make you as wise as I—and this is saying no little!

How are you employing your time? I sometimes ask myself this question, without being able to give a satisfactory answer. If I had to cast your horoscope I should predict that you would end by writing a book; it is the inevitable result of the sort of life you lead, and which all the women of France are leading. First, there is imagination, and sometimes affection; then follows hypocrisy, after which one attains to the pious stage; and finally, one becomes an author. God grant that you may never reach that point!

I hope to see Madame de M. in Paris this year. If she comes, I should like to have you meet her. You would then discover that brown bread is more difficult to make than you seem to think. If you are willing, nothing will be easier than to make the acquaintance of this baker.

Good-bye. The wind continues to blow. I am obliged to remain a month in the country, and if you have any time to spare, and wish to give me a great deal of pleasure, you have only to write to me at Avignon, where I shall call for your letter.

XIX

Avignon, July 20, 1842.

Since you take that view of it, upon my word, I capitulate. Give me brown bread; it is better than none at all. Only, allow me to say that it is brown, and continue to write to me. You will observe how humble and submissive I am!

Your letter reached me when I was steeped in melancholy, caused by the sad news of the death of the duc d’Orleans, which I had just learned upon returning from a trip into the mountains. I was sadly in need of a letter of another character; such as it was, your letter has at any rate proved a diversion.

I shall reply to it item by item. The figure of rhetoric of which you think yourself the inventor, has been known for a long time. With the aid of Greek, one might give it a new and whimsical name. In French it is called by the less stately name of a lie. Employ it with me as little as you can. Do not overtax it with others. It should be kept for unusual occasions. Do not make too great an effort to find the world silly and ridiculous. It is, alas! only too much so. You ought, on the contrary, to endeavour to imagine it as it is not. It is better to have too many illusions than not to have any at all. I still have a few, some of which are not very sound, but I make strenuous efforts to retain them.

Your story is very familiar. “There was once an idol.” Read Daniel; but he was mistaken—the head was not of gold; it was of clay, like the feet. But the idolater held a lamp in his hand, and the reflection from this lamp gilded the idol’s head. If I were the idol (you will observe that I do not on this occasion assume the attractive rôle), I should say: “Is it my fault that you have extinguished your lamp? Is that any excuse for destroying me?” It seems to me that I am becoming somewhat of an Oriental. So be it!

If you knew Madame de M. you would love her to distraction. She does not give me white bread, but she gives me something that takes its place. She is not a baker’s wife; she is a baker.

I grieve to see that you are becoming more and more affected. I am fully informed about your piety. I thank you for your prayers, if you do not mean them for a figure of speech. As to your blue cashmere, I am rather sceptical of your piety, because piety in 1842 is a fashion, just as blue cashmeres are. You will fail to understand the connection, but it is perfectly clear notwithstanding.

I regret very much that you are reading Pope’s translation of Homer. Read the translation of Dugas Montbel, which is the only one worth reading. If you had the courage to brave ridicule, and time to spare, you would get Planche’s Greek Grammar and his Dictionary. For a month the grammar would put you to sleep, but its effect would be seen later. After two months you would enjoy looking up the Greek words, translated usually almost literally by M. Montbel. Two months later still you would be able to guess fairly well, by the awkwardness of his expression, when the translator has failed to reproduce clearly the Greek phrase. By the end of a year you would read Homer as you read a melody with its accompaniment: the melody being the Greek, the accompaniment the translation. It is possible that you might then wish to study Greek seriously, in which case you would have the pleasure of reading many delightful books.

But I am supposing that your time is not absorbed in the selection of toilettes, or in displaying them before your friends. Everything in Homer is remarkable. The epithets, which in the French translation seem so strange, are wonderfully correct. I remember that he speaks of the sea as purple. I never understood what he meant until last summer, when I was in a little boat on the Gulf of Lepanto, going to Delphi. It was just at sunset. Immediately afterwards, the sea took on a magnificent deep violet tint, which lasted for ten minutes. To see this effect requires the atmosphere, the sea, and the sun of Greece. I hope that you will never become enough of an artist to recognise with pleasure that Homer was a great painter.

The final words of your letter are full of enigmas. You tell me that you will write to me no more, which would be a great misfortune. However, I yield to your decision, and you will hear nothing more from me except compliments. I believe I have already addressed to you several of these. You solicit one, I imagine, when you say you have neither feeling nor imagination. By continually denying their existence you may bring ill luck on yourself. One should not trifle with such things. But I have an idea that you intended only to try the experiment of your rhetorical figure on me. Fortunately I know how much to believe.

If you can think of anything pleasant to say to me, you might write. I shall remain here for a fortnight still. I want to add one word about the life I am leading, tramping the fields without meeting any other obstacle than rocks. Farewell. I hope you find me this time sufficiently submissive and well-behaved, Signora Fornarina?

XX

Paris, August 27, 1842.

I find awaiting me here a letter which is not so fierce as your recent ones have been. You might have sent it to me down there. Such a rare treat could not be too soon received. I hasten to congratulate you on your Greek studies, and to begin with something that interests you, I will tell you what in Greek are called persons who, like you, have hair of which they are justly proud. It is euplokamos. Eu means well, plokamos, a curl of hair. The two words together form an adjective. Homer has said somewhere: νυμφη δε εὑπλοκαμοσα Καλυψὡ, Calypso, nymph of the luxuriant tresses. Is it not very pretty? Ah! for the love of Greek, etc.

I regret exceedingly that you start so late in the season for Italy. You run the risk of seeing everything through odious rain-storms, which deprive the most beautiful mountains in the world of half their splendour; and you will be obliged to take my word for it when I praise the radiant skies of Naples. Neither will you have any good fruit to eat, but must content yourself instead with fig-eaters, birds so called because they live on figs.

I do not at all agree with your version of the parable.

On my return I had an adventure which mortified me not a little, since it showed me the sort of reputation I enjoy with the public. I was packing my luggage at Avignon, preparing to start for Paris, when there entered the room two venerable figures who introduced themselves as members of the Municipal Council. I supposed they had come for the purpose of talking about some church, when they announced pompously and verbosely that their visit had as its object to commend to my honour and to my virtue a lady who was to be my travelling companion. I replied, very peevishly, that they need have no fears concerning my honour and my virtue, but that I was not at all pleased to travel with a woman, for I should then not be able to smoke on the road.

Upon the arrival of the stage-coach I found within a woman, tall and pretty, simply and stylishly dressed, who said she was ill, and despaired of ever reaching Paris alive. We entered into conversation. I was as polite and agreeable as it is possible to be when I am compelled to remain long in the same position. My companion talked intelligently and with no Marseilles accent. She was an ardent Bonapartist, of very enthusiastic temperament; she believed in the immortality of the soul, not overmuch in the catechism, and was on the whole an optimist. I could not help feeling that she had a certain fear of me.

At Saint Etienne the two seated britzska was exchanged for a double carriage. We had the four seats to ourselves, and consequently twenty-four hours of tête-à-tête in addition to the preceding thirty. But although we chatted (what a pretty word!) unintermittingly, I was unable to learn anything of my opposite neighbour, except that she was going to be married, and that she was excellent company. To come to the point, we took on, at Moulins, two uncongenial travellers, and finally reached Paris, where my mysterious lady precipitated herself into the arms of a very ugly man who must have been her father. I took off my cap to her, and was about to get into a cab, when my unknown, leaving her father, came up to me and in a voice full of emotion, said:

“I am deeply touched, sir, by your kindness to me. I can not tell you how grateful I am. Never shall I forget the happiness I have had in travelling with such a celebrated man.” I am quoting her words. But this word celebrated explained the Municipal Councillors and the trepidation of the lady. They had evidently seen my name on the post-office register, and the lady, who had read my books, expected to be swallowed alive. This most unjust opinion of me must be shared, doubtless, by more than one of my lady readers. What ever put it into your head to want to know me? I was in a bad humour for two days following this incident; then I resigned myself to it. It is a remarkable fact, that after I became a great scamp I lived for two years on my former good reputation; but now that I have entirely reformed I still pass for a scapegrace.

As a fact, my wild life lasted but three years, and even then my heart was not in it. I threw myself into dissipation not from inclination, but partly from despondency, and partly, perhaps, out of curiosity. I am afraid, however, that this fact will injure my chances for membership in the Academy. I am criticised, also, for not being religious, and for not going to church. I might act the hypocrite, but I should not know how to go about it, and, besides, I should not have the patience.

If you are astonished that all the goddesses are fair, you will be still more astonished at Naples when you see statues with the hair coloured red. It seems that it was the fashion, formerly, for ladies to use red powder, nay, even gold powder. On the other hand, you will see in the paintings at the studios many goddesses with black hair. It is difficult for me to decide which colour I prefer. Only, I advise you not to powder your hair. There is a terrible Greek word which signifies black hair. Melanchaites (Μελαγχαἱτης); this χα has a diabolical sound.

I shall remain in Paris all the fall, I fancy, hard at work on a moral book, which will be about as amusing as the social war in which you will engage in Naples. Good-bye. You promised me some words of affection, and while I am still waiting for them, I am not very sanguine of receiving them.

You used to admire my wealth of antique gems. Alas! the other day I lost my most beautiful one, a magnificent Juno, while doing a kind act; that is, while carrying home a drunken man who had fractured his thigh. And that stone was an Etruscan. Juno held a scythe, and there is no other monument where she is so represented. Do sympathise with me!

XXI

You write charmingly in Greek, and much more legibly than you write in French. But who is your Greek teacher? You can not make me believe that you have learned to write that running hand from a book only. Who is the professor of rhetoric at D.?

Your letter is very gracious. I say this because I know that you enjoy compliments, and also because it is true. As I shall never learn, however, to correct my unfortunate habit of saying what I think to people who are not all the world to me, you may as well know that I see you are making rapid progress in wickedness, and that I am grieved thereby. You are becoming ironical, sarcastic, and even diabolical. All these words are, as you know, taken from the Greek, and your professor will explain to you what I mean by diabolical; διἁβλος, that is, calumniator. You ridicule my best qualities, and even when you praise me you do so with reservations and hesitations which rob the praise of all its worth.

It is a fact that at one time in my life I frequented bad society, but I was attracted to it through curiosity only, and I was always there as a stranger in a strange country. As for good society, I have found it often enough deadly tiresome. There are two places where I am at ease, at least, where I flatter myself I am in my proper element: first, among unpretentious people whom I have known for a long time; secondly, in a Spanish venta, with mule-drivers and Andalusian peasants. Write this in my funeral oration, and you will have told the truth.

If I mention my funeral oration, it is because I believe it is time for you to compose it. I have been seriously ill for a long time, and especially for the last two weeks. I have attacks of dizziness, spasms of pain, and frightful headaches. Something terrible must have happened to my brain, and I fancy that before long I may become, as Homer says, a companion of the shadowy Proserpine. I should like to know what you would say then. I should be charmed if you were to grieve for two weeks. Do you think this is too much to ask?

I am spending part of the night writing, or else in tearing up what I wrote the night before, consequently I make slow progress. What I am writing interests me, but the question is, Will it interest the public? I consider the ancients far more interesting than ourselves; they had no such paltry aims, nor were they so engrossed as we are in a multitude of silly trifles. I find that my hero, Julius Caesar, at the age of fifty-three, committed all sorts of follies for the sake of Cleopatra, forgetting all else for her; this is why he came so near drowning, both literally and figuratively. What man of our century, among our statesmen, I mean, who is not completely callous, completely heartless, by the time he aspires to a seat in the Senate? I should like to explain the difference between that age and our own, but how shall I do it?

Have you come to a passage in the Odyssey that I consider wonderful? It is where Ulysses is living with Alcinoüs, still unknown, and after dinner a poet comes before him and sings of the war of Troy. The little that I have seen of Greece gives me a clearer understanding of Homer. Everywhere throughout the Odyssey is seen that amazing love cherished by the Greeks for their native land. There is in modern Greek a charming word: it is ξενιτεἱα, an alien. To be in a strange land is for a Greek the greatest of misfortunes, but to die there is the most terrible calamity of which they can conceive.

You scoff at my epicureanism. Have you ever tried to imagine the nature of the entrails which the Greek heroes ate with such relish? The modern philosophers still eat them: they are called κονκονρἑτζι, and are simply delicious. There are little wooden skewers made of the fragrant wood of the mastic tree, with something crisp and spicy around them, which makes one readily understand why the priests used to reserve for themselves this dainty morsel from their victims.

Good-bye. If I were to pursue this subject, you would think me more of a glutton than I am. I have no appetite at all, and nothing in the way of little delicacies can any longer tempt me. This means that I am only fit to throw to the crows. There will be deuced weather all through October, and that will finish me!

XXII

Paris, October 24, 1842.

You are exceedingly kind to leave me in ignorance of that part of the globe which is so fortunate as to possess you. Shall I address this letter to Naples, or to ..., or even to Paris? In your last letter you say that you are about to start for Paris, perhaps for Italy, and since then not a single word of news. I have a suspicion that you are here, and that you will inform me of the fact after you have left; this will be highly in character.

Since writing to you I went away for several days, when, upon my return, I found your letter, dated so long ago that I thought it useless to send an answer to.... I marvel greatly that you have learned without assistance to write the Greek characters, as you say you have. If you will only be a little patient, with such talent as yours you will become a second Madame Dacier. For my own part, I no longer take any interest either in Greek or in French; I have fallen into a fossil state, and whether I read or write, the letters dance up and down before my eyes in a most disagreeable way.

You ask if there are any Greek romances. Certainly there are, but in my opinion they are very tiresome. You might procure a translation of Theagenia and Charicleia, which the late Racine liked so well. Try to swallow it, if you can. There is also Daphnis and Chloe, translated by Courier. The latter is affectedly artless, and none too meritorious. Finally, there is an admirable story, but it is very, very immoral. I refer to The Ass, by Lucian, also translated by Courier. No one ever admits that he has read it, but it is his masterpiece. About that you must decide for yourself. I wash my hands of the responsibility.

The trouble with the Greeks is that their ideas of decency, and even of morality, were very different from ours. There are many things in their literature which might shock, nay, even disgust you if you understood them. After reading Homer, you can take up confidently the tragedy writers, who will amuse you, and whom you will enjoy because you have a taste for the beautiful, a sentiment which the Greeks possessed in the highest degree, and which a happy few of us inherit from them.

If you have the courage to undertake history, you will be charmed with Herodotus, Polybdus, and Xenophon. I find Herodotus enchanting, and know of nothing more entertaining. Begin with The Anabasis, or with the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. Take a map of Asia, and follow the course of these ten thousand rascals in their journey. It is a gigantic Froissard. Then read Herodotus, and finally Polybdus and Thucydides. The last two are very serious. Procure also a copy of Theocritus, and read The Syracusans. I would recommend also Lucian, who is the wittiest of all the Greek writers, according to our standards of wit, but he is very wicked, and so I dare not.

Here are three pages of Greek. As for the pronunciation, if you wish, I will send you a page which I prepared especially for you. It will teach you the best method, that is, the pronunciation used by modern Greeks. The classical is easier, but it is absurd.

We began our correspondence by telling jokes, then we did what? I shall not remind you. And now we are becoming erudite. There is a Latin proverb which eulogises the happy medium. When I began to write I intended to say all sorts of severe things, and it is to Greek that you owe the absolute sweetness of my letter. It is not that I bear you less ill-will for your persistent insincerity, only, while writing, I have lost some of my bad humour. If you are not in Italy, do not regret it. The weather there is frightful, with rain, cold, etc. Nothing is more hideous than a land which is not accustomed to these two plagues. Good-bye. I should be very glad to know where you are. Ἑῥῥωσο (grow strong).

This is the end of a Greek letter.

P.S.—Opening a book, I have found these two little flowers, which I plucked at Thermopylæ, upon the hilltop where Leonidas died. It is a relic, as you see.

XXIII

Thursday, October, 1842.

Should you like to hear an Italian opera with me to-night? I have a box on Thursdays with my cousin and his wife. They are now travelling, and I have the box to myself. You should come accompanied by your brother, or by one of your relatives who does not know me. You would please me greatly by coming. Send me a line before six o’clock, and I will let you know the number of the box. I think La Cenerentola will be given. Invent some pretty fiction, which you must tell me in advance, to explain my presence; but manage it so that I may speak with you there.

XXIV

Friday morning, October, 1842.

I thank you very much for having come yesterday. You gave me a great deal of pleasure. I hope your brother saw nothing extraordinary in our meeting. I have an Etruscan seal for you; I can not endure the one you are using. I will give you the other the next time I see you. I enclose the page of Greek which I prepared for you. When you have a relapse into an erudite mood it may be of use.

XXV

Tuesday night, October, 1842.

I have lost nothing, as it seems, by waiting for your letter. It is studiously perverse; but believe me, perverseness is not becoming to you. Abandon this style, and resume your customary coquetry, which suits you marvellously.

It would be nothing short of cruelty on my part to wish to see you, since this would cause you to be so ill that it would require an enormous quantity of cakes to cure you. I can not imagine where you have conceived the idea that I have friends in the four corners of the globe. You know perfectly well that I have only one or two friends in Madrid. Believe me, I am very grateful for the kindness you showed me at the Italian opera the other night. I appreciate, as I should, your condescension in letting me see your face for two hours; and truth compels me to say that I admired it extremely, as I did your hair also, which I had never seen so closely before.

As for your assertion that you have never refused me anything that I asked, you will have to remain several million years in purgatory for that pretty fib. I see that you are anxious to have my Etruscan stone, and as I am more magnanimous than you, I shall not say, like Leonidas, “Come and take it!” but I shall ask you again how you wish me to send it to you.

I have no recollection of comparing you to Cerberus; yet both have, indeed, several points of resemblance, not only because, like him, you love tarts, but also because you have three heads. I mean to say three brains; one, that of a shocking coquette; another, that of an experienced diplomatist; the third I shall not tell you, because I am not going to say anything amiable to you to-day. I am very ill and miserable on account of several misfortunes that have descended on my head. If you have any influence with Destiny, pray him to treat me kindly for the next two or three months. I have just been to see Frédégonde, which bored me to death, in spite of Mademoiselle Rachel, who has magnificent black eyes, without any white, like the devil’s, they say.

XXVI

Paris, Tuesday night.

I do not understand you, and I am tempted to believe you to be the very worst of coquettes. Your former letter, in which you tell me that you no longer know me, put me in a bad humour, and I have not replied to it promptly. You say, also, with a great deal of civility, that you do not care to see me, for fear of becoming tired of me. Unless I am mistaken, we have seen each other six or seven times in six years, and if we add together the minutes, we may have passed three or four hours together, half the time saying nothing. However, we are well enough acquainted for you to have learned to like me a little, the proof of which you gave me Thursday. We know each other really better than people who meet in society, considering the length of time we have conversed in our letters with a certain amount of freedom.

Confess, then, that it is scarcely flattering to my self-esteem that now, after an acquaintance of six years, you should treat me thus. Nevertheless, as I have no means of overcoming your resolutions, it shall be as you wish in this case, but I think it is rather silly not to see each other. I beg your pardon for using this word which is neither polite nor friendly, but which, in my opinion at least, is unfortunately true.

I did not in any way ridicule you the other evening; on the contrary, I thought you extremely self-possessed. As for the antique seal, you shall see an impression from it on this letter, and it is subject to your orders, when you have told me where I shall give it to you—no, how you wish it sent to you. Let us not offend the eternal fitness of things.

I ask nothing from you in exchange, for the reason that everything I have asked you have refused me. If you consider it wrong to see me, is it not wrong, also, to write to me? As I am not very proficient in your catechism, there is some confusion in my mind on this point. I speak too harshly, perhaps, but you have wounded my feelings, and when I am unhappy I can not escape from it, as you can, by devouring cakes. In truth, that is quite worthy of Cerberus.

XXVII

Paris, Saturday, November, 1842.

Das Lied des Claerchens gefällt mir zu gar; aber warum haben Sie nicht das Ende geschrieben?

The interest which you manifest in that Etruscan stone is truly delightful to see! How many cakes do you think it is worth? You have never even asked about the inscription it bears. It is a man turning a ewer. I should say an amphora, which is a Greek word and more high-sounding. In former times, perhaps, the seal belonged to a potter; there is, indeed, a mythological allusion which I might explain to you if I would. As for the other seal, it has a strange history. I found it in the chimney-place, as I was poking the fire, in the rue d’Alger; it is a very large, heavy bronze ring, and the characters on it are mystical. It is supposed to have been used by a magician, or even by the gnostics. You have noticed on it a small man, a sun, a moon, etc. Is it not a curious thing to find in the ashes in the rue d’Alger? Who knows if it is not to the mysterious power of this ring that I owe your song of Claire?

I am really ill, but that is no reason why I should not go out. If, for instance, you wished to receive the Etruscan ring from my own hand, I would give it to you with the greatest pleasure; while it would be conspicuous and cause gossip if I should send it in a letter by your bearer. But I do not want to ask anything more from you, for you become more despotic every day, and you have acquired the most odious subtleties of coquetry. It appears that you do not appreciate eyes without any white, and that you admire blue-white eyes. You take good care, also, to remind me of your own eyes, which I remember quite well, although I have seen them so seldom.

Who has taught you this peculiarity, which you dare to tell me you did not know? Was it your Greek teacher, or your German teacher? Or am I to believe that you learned by yourself to write German script, as you did the Greek? Another article of faith to add to your aversion to mirrors! You ought to cultivate a German flower called die Aufrichtigkeit.

I have just written the word End at the close of a piece of very learned writing, which I composed in the worst possible humour; it remains to be seen whether this word does not signify dulness and prolixity. However, now that it is finished, I feel relieved of a burden and much happier, which explains my blandness and amiability towards you; otherwise I should have told you some sharp truths about yourself.

You should see me, if it were only to escape from the atmosphere of flattery in which you live. We must go some day to the Museum to see the Italian paintings. It would be a compensation for the journey you failed to take, and to have me for a guide is an inestimable privilege. This is not a condition on which I shall give you my Etruscan stone. Say how, and you shall have it.

XXVIII

Paris, November, 1842.

M. de Montrond says that we should beware of our first impulses, because they are usually trustworthy. One would suppose that you had given much consideration to this beautiful maxim, for you practise it with rare constancy. When a good resolution occurs to you, you postpone it indefinitely. If I were at Civita Vecchia I should seek among the gems of my good friend Bucci for some Etruscan Minerva; it would be the most appropriate seal for you. Meanwhile, my potter is all ready, and I still say, like Leonidas: Μολὡν λαβἑ. I think I shall keep it for some time still, until the eve of your departure.

I must tell you that I am feeling much better, and am less a prey to the blue devils. I find pleasure even in my work, which I have not done for a long time. I am forming great plans for the winter, which is a sign of better spirits. This is why I write so cheerfully, for if I had written immediately after receiving your German letter I should have criticised your faults in my most severe style. You will not be deprived of this even now, because if I see the world to-day through rose-coloured glasses, that is all the more reason why they will soon reflect a darker hue.

I should be glad to know what you are doing, and how you occupy your time. When I see you so learned in Greek and in German, I conclude that you are very lonely at ..., and that you are spending your life among your books, with some wise professors to explain them to you. Yet I wonder whether it is not otherwise in Paris, and I fancy the days there passed in amusements of another kind. If I had not lived so long in the strictest solitude, I should know all about your actions and movements, and the reports that I should hear would give me an impression of you very unlike the one I receive from your letters.

While you love to praise yourself, it pleases me to believe that you are more natural with me, by which I mean less insincere, than you are in society. There are in you so many contradictions that I am terribly puzzled to reach an exact conclusion; that is to say, to the sum total + so many good qualities, — so many bad ones = x. It is this x that I find confusing.

When I saw you at the home of our friend Madame V., just as you were leaving Paris, your extreme elegance and style astonished me greatly. The cakes that you devour so hungrily, after the fatigue of the opera, have astonished me still more. Not that I do not place love of admiration and epicureanism among the chief of your faults, but I supposed that these faults had a mental rather than a tangible form; I imagined that you cared very little for dress, and that eating was to you only a diversion; that you enjoyed making an impression by your beautiful eyes and your clever sayings, rather than by your gowns. See how mistaken I was!

But this time you shall not reproach me with pessimism, for while you have been falling from grace day by day, I fancy that I have improved. It is unreasonably late and I have abandoned a highly learned company of Greeks and Romans to write to you.

I am just reminded that I must rise early to-morrow—that is, to-day—which prevents me from explaining in what way I am better than I used to be, while you have been amusing yourself teasing me about Madame.... I will defer my own praises for another time; besides, I have come to the end of my paper.

XXIX

Paris, December 2, 1842.

There is in some old Spanish romance a very pleasing tale. A barber had his shop at the corner of the street, and the shop had two doors. Through one of these doors he used to pass out into the street, stab a passer-by, then hurrying into the shop, he went out the other door and bandaged the wounds of his victim. Gelehrten ist gut predigen.

I bear no grudge against your blue cashmere or your cakes; all such things are perfectly natural. I even admire coquetry and greediness, but only when one confesses them frankly. But you, who very justly aspire to be something more than a mere woman of the world, why should you have its defects? Why are you never frank with me? To give you an example of frankness, will you, or will you not, come with me to the Museum next Tuesday? If you are not willing, or if it will inconvenience or embarrass you to come, you shall receive your Etruscan seal in a little box Tuesday evening, and it will be delivered to you as naturally as possible.

Your propensity for coquetry is very amusing. You chide me for being indifferent, but if I were not so, or if I did not make a show of indifference, you would drive me mad. Why does one carry an umbrella? Because it rains.

Notwithstanding your wishes, Madame de M. will certainly come to Paris. She has to purchase the trousseau of her daughter, who is to be married in the spring. Unless an unforeseen revolution occurs, the said trousseau will be made in Paris, and the marriage, also, may take place here.