I left abruptly, lest the following elegant announcement should appear in the police gazettes:  “Mr. Edgar de Meilhan, landed proprietor, having made an attack upon Madame Louise Guerin, screen-painter, &c.”—­for I felt the strongest desire to strangle the object of my devotion, and I think I should have done so had I remained ten minutes longer.

Admire, dear Roger, the wisdom of my conduct, and endeavor to imitate it.  It is more commendable to control one’s passions than an army, and it is more difficult.

My wrath was so great that I went to Mantes to see Alfred!  To open the door of paradise and then shut it in my face, spread before me a splendid banquet and prevent me from sitting down to it, promise me love and then offer me prudery, is an infamous, abominable and even indelicate act.  Do you know, dear Roger, that I just escaped looking like a goose; the rage that possessed me gave a tragic expression to my features, which alone saved me from ridicule!  Such things we never forgive a woman, and Louise shall pay me yet!

I swear to you that if a woman of my own rank had acted thus towards me, I should have crushed her without mercy; but Louise’s humble position restrained me.  I feel a pity for the weak which will be my ruin; for the weak are pitiless towards the strong.

Poor Alfred must be an excellent fellow not to have thrown me out of the window.  I was so dull with him, so provoking, so harsh, so scoffing, that I am astonished that he could endure me for two minutes.  My nerves were in such a state of irritation that I beheaded with my whip more than five hundred poppies along the road.  I who never have committed an assault upon any foliage, whose conscience is innocent of the murder of a single flower!  For a moment I had a notion to ask a catafalque of the romantic Marquise.  You may judge from that the disordered state of my faculties and my complete moral prostration.

At last, ashamed of abusing Alfred’s hospitality in such a manner, and feeling incapable of being anything else than irritable, cross-grained and intractable, I returned to Richeport, to be as gloomy and disagreeable as I pleased.

Here, dear Roger, I pause—­I take time, as the actors say; it is worth while.  As fluently as you may read hieroglyphics, and explain on the spot the riddles of the sphinx, you can never guess what I found at Richeport, in my mother’s room!  A white black-bird? a black swan? a crocodile? a megalonyx?  Priest John or the amorabaquin?  No, something more enchantingly improbable, more wildly impossible.  What was it?  I will tell you, for a hundred million guesses would never bring you nearer the truth.

Near the window, by my mother’s side, sat a young woman, bending over an embroidery frame, threading a needle with red worsted.  At the sound of my voice she raised her head and I recognised—­Louise Gruerin!

At this unexpected sight, I stood stupified, like Pradon’s Hippolyte.