It is a question of nothing less than anticipating an irreparable misfortune.  There is but one step from love to hate; hate which takes revenge is still love.  Tell this child that she is playing with thunder; tell her the thunder mutters, and will soon burst over her head.  If Mademoiselle de Chateaudun should have a new love for her excuse, if she has broken her faith to give it to another, unhappy, thrice unhappy she!  M. de Monbert has a quick eye and a practised hand; mourning would follow swiftly in the wake of her rejoicing, and Mademoiselle de Chateaudun might order her widow’s weeds and her bridal robes at the same time.

This, madame, is all that I have to say.  The foolish rapture with which my last letter teemed is not worth speaking of.  A broken hope, crushed, extinguished; a happiness vanished ere fully seen!  During the four days that I was at Richeport, I began to remark the existence between M. de Meilhan and myself of a sullen, secret, unavowed but real irritation, when a letter from M. de Monbert solved the enigma by convincing me that I was in the way under that roof.  Fool, why did I not see it myself and sooner?  Blind that I was, not to perceive from the first that this young man loved that woman!  Why did I not instantly divine that this young poet could not live unscathed near so much beauty, grace and sweetness?  Did I think, unhappy man that I am, that she was only fair to me; that I alone had eyes to admire her, a heart to worship and understand her?  Yes, I did think it; I believed blindly that she bloomed for me alone; that she had not existed before our meeting; that no look, save mine, had ever rested upon her; that she was, in fact, my creation; that I had formed her of my thoughts, and vivified her with the fire of my dreams.  Even now, when we are parted for ever, I believe, that if God ever created two beings for each other, we are those two beings, and if every soul has a sister spirit, her soul is the sister spirit of mine.  M. de Meilhan loves her; who would not love her?  But what he loves in her is visible beauty:  the slope of her shoulders, the perfection of her contours.  His love could not withstand a pencil-stroke which might destroy the harmony of the whole.  Beautiful as she is, he would desert her for the first canvas or the first statue he might encounter.  Her rivals already people the galleries of the Louvre; the museums of the world are filled with them.  Edgar feels but one deep and true love; the love of Art, so deep that it excludes or absorbs all others in his heart.  A fine prospect alone charms him, if it recalls a landscape of Ruysdael or of Paul Huet, and he prefers to the loveliest model, her portrait, provided it bears the signature of Ingres or Scheffer.  He loves this woman as an artist; he has made her the delight of his eyes; she would have been the joy of my whole life.  Besides, Edgar does not possess any of the social virtues.  He is whimsical by nature, hostile to the proprieties,