And really, madame, you do possess the faculty of dissipating fatal enchantments.  Like the morning star, which disperses the mighty gatherings of goblins and gnomes, you have shone upon my horizon and Lady Penock has vanished like a shadow.  Thanks to you, I crossed France with impunity from the borders of Isere to the borders of the Creuse, and then to the banks of the Seine, without encountering the implacable islander who pursued me from the fields of Latium to the foot of the Grande Chartreuse.  I must not forget to state that at Voreppe, where I stopped to change horses, the keeper of the ruined inn, recognising my carriage, politely presented me with a bill for damages; so much for a broken glass, so much for a door beaten in, so much for a shattered ladder.  I commend to M. de Braimes this brilliant stroke of one of his constituents; it is an incident forgotten by Cervantes in the history of his hero.

In spite of my character of knight-errant, I reached my dear mountains without any other adventure.  I had not visited them for three years, and the sight of their rugged tops rejoiced my heart.  You would like the country; it is poor, but poetic.  You would enjoy its green solitudes, its uncultivated fields, its silent valleys and little lakes enshrined like sheets of crystal in borders of sage and heather.  Its chief charm to me is its obscurity; no curiosity-hunter or ordinary tourist has ever frightened away the dryads from its chestnut groves or the naiads from its fresh streams.  Even a flitting poet has scarcely ever betrayed its rural mysteries.  My chateau has none of the grandeur that you have, perhaps, ascribed to it.  Picture to yourself a pretty country-house, lightly set on a hill-top, and pensively overlooking the Creuse flowing at its feet under an arbor of alder-bushes and flowering ash.  Such as it is, imbedded in woods which shelter it from the northern blasts and protect it from the heats of the summer solstice; there—­if the hope that inspires me is not an illusion of my bewildered brain; if the light that dazzles me is not a chance spark from chimerical fires, there, among the scenes where I first saw the light, I would hide my happiness.  You see, madame, that my hand trembles as I write.  One evening you and I were walking together, under the trees in your garden; your children played about us like young kids upon the green sward.  As we walked we talked, and insensibly began to speak of that vague need of loving which torments our youth.  You said that love was a grave undertaking, and that often our whole life depended upon our first choice.  I spoke of my aspirations towards those unknown delights, which haunted me with their seductive visions as Columbus was haunted by visions of a new world.  Gravely and pensively you listened to me, and when I began to trace the image of the oft-dreamed-of woman, so vainly sought for in the ungrateful domain of reality, I remember that you smiled as you said:  “Do not despair, she exists; you will meet her some day.”  Were you speaking earnestly then?  Is it she?  Keep still, do not even breathe, she might fly away.