I have uselessly assumed the furious air of an angry Minerva, the majestic deportment of the Queen of England opening Parliament, the prudish, affected behavior of a school-mistress on promenade; all this only incites his hopes.  If it were love it might be seductive and dangerous, but it is nothing more than magnetism....  You may laugh, but it is surely this and nothing else; he acts as if he were under some spell of fascination; he looks at me in a malevolent way that he thinks irresistible....  But I find it unendurable.  I shall end by frankly telling him that in point of magnetism I am no longer free ... “that I love another,” as the vaudeville says, and if he asks who is this other, I shall smilingly tell him, “it is the famous disciple of Mesmer, Dr. Dupotet.”

Yesterday his foolish behavior was very near causing my death.  Alarmed by an embarrassing tete-a-tete in the midst of an old castle we were visiting, I mounted the window-sill in one of the towers to call Madame Taverneau, whom I saw at the foot of the hill; the stone on which I stood gave way, and if M. de Meilhan had not shown great presence of mind and caught me, I would have fallen down a precipice forty feet deep!  Instant death would have been the result.  Oh! how frightened I was!  I tremble yet.  My terror was so great that I would have fainted if I had had a little more confidence; but another fear made me recover from this.  Fortunately I am going away from here, and this trifling will be over.

Yes, certainly I will accompany you to Geneva.  Why can’t we go as far as Lake Como?  What a charming trip to take, and what comfort we will enjoy in my nice carriage!  You must know that my travelling-carriage is a wonder; it is being entirely renovated, and directly it is finished, I will jump in it and fly to your arms.  Of course you will ask what I am to do with a travelling-carriage—­I who have never made but one journey in my life, and that from the Marais to the Faubourg Saint Honore?  I will reply, that I bought this carriage because I had the opportunity; it is a chef-d’oeuvre.  There never was a handsomer carriage made in London.  It was invented—­and you will soon see what a splendid invention it is—­for an immensely rich English lady who is always travelling, and who is greatly distressed at having to sell it, but she believes herself pursued by an audacious young lover whom she wishes to get rid of, and as he has always recognised her by her carriage, she parts with it in order to put him off her track.  She is an odd sort of woman whom they call Lady Penock; she resembles Levassor in his English roles; that is to say, she is a caricature.  Levassor would not dare to be so ridiculous.

Good-bye, until I see you.  When I think that in one month we shall be together again, I forget all my sorrows.

IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN.

XV.

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