The whole is heated by a cyclopean chimney, which devours a load of wood at a mouthful, and before which a mastodon might be roasted.

Come, then, dear Roger, I can offer you a friendly ruin, the chapel with the trefoil quadrilobes.

We will walk together, axe in hand, through my park, which is as dense and impenetrable as the virgin forests of America, or the jungles of India.  It has not been touched for sixty years, and I have sworn to break the head of the first gardener who dares to approach it with a pruning-hook.

It is glorious to see the abandonment of Nature in this extravagance of vegetation, this wild luxuriance of flowers and foliage; the trees stretch out their arms, breed and intertwine in the most fantastic manner; the branches make a hundred curiously-distorted turns, and interlace in beautiful disorder; sometimes hanging the red berries of the mountain-ash among the silver foliage of the aspen.

The rapid slope of the ground produces a thousand picturesque accidents; the grass, brightened by a spring which at a little distance plays a thousand pranks over the rocks, flourishes in rich luxuriance; the burdock, with large velvet leaves, the stinging nettles, the hemlock with greenish umbels; the wild oats—­every weed prospers wonderfully.  No stranger approaches the enclosure, whose denizens are two or three little deer with tawny coats gleaming through the trees.

This eminently romantic spot would harmonize with your melancholy.  Mlle. de Chateaudun not being in Paris, you have better chance of finding her elsewhere.

Who knows if she has not taken refuge in one of these pretty bird’s-nests embedded in moss and foliage, their half-open blinds overlooking the limpid flow of the Seine?  Come quickly, my dear fellow; I will not take advantage of your position as I did of Alfred’s, to overwhelm you from my moucharaby with a shower of green frogs, a miracle which he has not been able to explain to his entire satisfaction.  I will show you an excellent spot to fish for white-bait; nothing calms the passions so much as fishing with rod and line; a philosophical recreation which fools have turned into ridicule, as they do everything else they do not understand.

If the fish won’t bite, you can gaze at the bridge, its piers blooming with wild flowers and lavender; its noisy mills, its arches obstructed by nets; the church, with its truncated roof; the village covering the hill-side, and, against the horizon, the sharp line of woody hills.

EDGAR DE MEILHAN

IV.

RAYMOND DE VILLIERS to M. EDGAR DE MEILHAN,
Richeport, near Pont de l’Arche (Eure).

GRENOBLE, Hotel of the Prefecture, May 22d 18—.

Do not expect me, dear Edgar, I shall not be at Richeport the 24th.  When shall I?  I cannot tell.