IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN to MME. LA VICOMTESSE DE BRAIMES,
Hotel de la Prefecture, Grenoble (Isere).

PARIS, July 27th 18—.

Valentine, I am very uneasy.  Why have I not heard from you for a month?  Are you in any trouble?  Is one of your dear children ill?  Are you no longer at Grenoble?  Have you taken your trip without me?  The last would be the most acceptable reason for your silence.  You have not received my letters, and ignorance of my sorrows accounts for your not writing to console me.  Yet never have I been in greater need of the offices of friendship.  The resolution I have just taken fills me with alarm.  I acted against my judgment, but I could not do otherwise.  I was influenced by an agonized mother, whose hallowed grief persuaded me against my will to espouse her interests.  Why have I not a friend here to interpose in my behalf and save me from myself?  But, after all, does it make any difference what becomes of me?  Hope is dead within me.  I no longer dream of happiness.  At last the sad mystery is explained....  M. de Villiers is not free; he is engaged to his cousin....  Oh, he does not love her, I am sure, but he is a slave to his plighted troth, and of course she loves him and will not release him ...  Can he, for a stranger, sacrifice family ties and a love dating from his childhood?  Ah! if he really loved me, he would have had the courage to make this sacrifice; but he only felt a tender sympathy for me, lively enough to fill him with everlasting regret, not strong enough to inspire him with a painful resolution.  Thus two beings created for each other meet for a moment, recognise one another, and then, unwillingly, separate, carrying in their different paths of life a burden of eternal regrets!  And they languish apart in their separate spheres, unhappy and attached to nothing but the memory of the past—­made wretched for life by the accidents of a day!

They are as the passengers of different ships, meeting for an hour in the same port, who hastily exchange a few words of sympathy, then pass away to other latitudes, under other skies—­some to the North, others to the South, to the land of ice—­to the cradle of the sun—­far, far away from each other, to die.  Is it then true that I shall never see him again?  Oh, my God! how I loved him!  I can never forgive him for not accepting this love that I was ready to lavish upon him.

I will now tell you what I have resolved to do.  If I waver a moment I shall not have the courage to keep my promise.  Madame de Meilhan is coming after me; I could not, after causing her such sorrow, resist the tears of this unhappy mother.  She was in despair; her son had suddenly left her, and in spite of the secrecy of his movements, she discovered that he was at Havre and had taken passage there for America, on the steamer Ontario.  She hoped to reach Havre in time to see her son, and she relied upon me to bring him home.  I am distressed at