shall transcribe. I am afraid that it will satisfy neither my male nor my female readers; but the letter was in truth none other than that which follows, and this glorious romance will have no other conclusion.
XVII
“You are no doubt greatly surprised, my dear D'Albert, at what I have just done after acting as I did. I will allow you to be so, for you have reason. The odds are that you have already bestowed upon me at least twenty of the epithets that we had agreed to erase from our vocabulary-perfidious, inconstant, wicked, — is it not so? At least you will not call me cruel or virtuous, and that is still something gained. You curse me and you are wrong. You desired me, you loved me, I was your ideal;-very well. I at once granted you what you asked; it was your own fault that you did not have it sooner. I served as a body for your dream as compliantly as possible. I gave you what assuredly I shall never again give to any one, a surprise on which you hardly counted and for which you ought to be more grateful to me. Now that I have satisfied you, it pleases me to go away. What is there so monstrous in this?
“You have been with me entirely and unreservedly for a whole night; what more would you have? Another night, and then another; you would even make free with the days if need were. You would go on this way until you were surfeited with me. I can hear you from this crying out most gallantly that I am not one of those with whom surfeit is possible. Good gracious! I am like the rest.
“It would last six months, two years, ten years even, if you will, but still everything must have an end. You would keep me from a kind of feeling of propriety, or because you would not have the courage to give me my dismissal. What would be the use of waiting until matters came to this?
“And then, it might perhaps be myself who would cease to love you. I have found you charming; perhaps by dint of seeing you, I might have come to find you detestable. Forgive me this supposition. Living with you in close intimacy, I should no doubt have had occasion to see you in a cotton cap or in some ridiculous or facetious domestic situation. You would necessarily have lost the romantic and mysterious side which allures me more than anything else, and your character, when better understood, would no longer have appeared so strange to me. I should have been less taken up with you through having you beside me, in something like the fashion in which we treat those books that we never open because they are in our libraries. Your nose or your wit would no longer have seemed nearly so well turned; I should have perceived that your coat did not fit you and that your stockings were untidy; I should have had a thousand deceptions of this kind which would have given me singular pain, and at last I should have come to this conclusion: that you decidedly had neither heart nor soul, and that I was destined to be misunderstood in love.
“You adore me and I you. You have not the slightest reproach to make against me, and I have nothing in the world to complain of in you. I have been perfectly faithful to you throughout our amour. I have deceived you in nothing. I had neither false bosom nor false virtue; you had the extreme kindness to tell me that I was yet more beautiful than you had imagined. For the beauty that I gave you, you repaid me with pleasure; we are quits:-I go my way and you yours, and perhaps we shall meet again at the Antipodes. Live in this hope.
“You believe, perhaps, that I do not love you because I am leaving you. Later, you will recognize the truth of the contrary. Had I valued you lees, I should have remained, and would have poured out to you the insipid beverage to the dregs. Your love would soon have died of weariness; after a time you would have quite forgotten me, and, as you read over my name on the list of your conquests, would have asked yourself: 'Now, who the deuce was she?' I have at least the satisfaction of thinking that you will remember me sooner than another. Your unsated desire will again spread its wings to fly to me; I shall ever be to you something desirable to which your fancy will love to return, and I hope that in the arms of the mistresses you may have, you will sometimes think of the unrivalled night you spent with me.
“Never will you be more amiable than you were that blissful evening, and, even were you equally so, it would still be something less; for in love, as in poetry, to remain at the same point is to go back. Keep to that impression, and you will do well.
“You have rendered the task of the lovers I may have (if I have other lovers) a difficult one, and no one will be able to efface the memory of you;-they will be the heirs of Alexander.
“If you are too much grieved at losing me, burn this letter, which is the only proof that you have possessed me, and you will believe that you have had a beautiful dream. What is there to hinder you? The vision has vanished before the light, at the hour when dreams return home through the horn or the ivory gate. How many have died who, less fortunate than you, have not even given a single kiss to their chimera!
“I am neither capricious, nor mad, nor a conceited prude. What I am doing is the result of profound conviction. It is not in order to inflame you more, or from calculating coquetry that I have gone away from C-; do not try to follow me or to find me again: you will not succeed. My precautions to conceal from you all traces of myself have been too well taken; you will always be for me the man who opened up to me a world of new sensations. These are things that a woman does not easily forget. Though absent, I shall often think of you, oftener than if you were with me.
“Comfort poor Rosette as well as you can, for she must be at least as sorry for my departure as you are. Love each other well in memory of me, whom both of you have loved, and breathe my name sometimes in a kiss.”
