Isn’t it singular that I should fall desperately in love with this simple shepherdess—­I who have resisted the sea-green glances and smiles of the sirens that dwell in the Parisian ocean?  Have I escaped from the Marquise’s Israelite turbans only to become a slave to a straw bonnet?  I have passed safe and sound through the most dangerous defiles to be worsted in open country; I could swim in the whirlpool, and now drown in a fish-pond; every celebrated beauty, every renowned coquette finds me on my guard.  I am as circumspect as a cat walking over a table covered with glass and china.  It is hard to make me pose, as they say in a certain set; but when the adversary is not to be feared, I allow him so many advantages that in the end he subdues me.

I was not sufficiently on my guard with Louise at first.

I said to myself:  “She is only a grisette”—­and left the door of my heart open—­love entered in, and I fear I shall have some trouble in driving him out.

Excuse, dear Roger, this nonsense, but I must write you something.  After all, my passion is worth as much as yours.  Love is the same whether inspired by an empress or a rope-dancer, and I am just as unhappy at Louise’s disappearance as you are at Irene’s.

EDGAR DE MEILHAN

XI.

ROGER DE MONBERT to MONSIEUR DE MEILHAN,
Pont de l’Arche (Eure).

PARIS, June 3d 18—.

She is in Paris!

Before knowing it I felt it.  The atmosphere was filled with a voice, a melody, a brightness, a perfume that murmured:  Irene is here!

Paris appears to me once more populated; the crowd is no longer a desert in my eyes; this great dead city has recovered its spirit of life; the sun once more smiles upon me; the earth bounds under my feet; the soft summer air fans my burning brow, and whispers into my ear that one adored name—­Irene!

Chance has a treasure-house of atrocious combinations.  Chance!  The cunning demon!  He calls himself Chance so as to better deceive us.  With an infernal skilfulness he feigns not to watch us in the decisive moments of our lives, and at the same time leads us like blind fools into the very path he has marked out for us.

You know the two brothers Ernest and George de S. were planted by their family in the field of diplomacy:  they study Eastern languages and affect Eastern manners.  Well, yesterday we met in the Bois de Boulogne, they in a calash, and I on horseback—­I am trying riding as a moral hygiene—­as the carriage dashed by they called out to me an invitation to dinner; I replied, “Yes,” without stopping my horse.  Idleness and indolence made me say “Yes,” when I should have said, “No;” but Yes is so much easier to pronounce than No, especially on horseback. No necessitates a discussion; Yes ends the matter, and economizes words and time.