Her letters?  Well, they are such letters as she might have written.  ’By the tideless sea at Cannes on a summer day,’ says their anonymous author, ’I had fallen asleep, and the plashing of the waves upon the shore had doubtless made me dream.  When I awoke the yellow paper-covered volumes of Prosper Merimee’s Lettres a une Inconnue lay beside me; I had been reading the book before I fell asleep, but the answers—­had they ever been written, or had I only dreamed?’ The invention of the love-letters of a curious and unknown personality, the heroine of one of the great literary flirtations of our age, was a clever idea, and certainly the author has carried out his scheme with wonderful success; with such success indeed that it is said that one of our statesmen, whose name occurs more than once in the volume, was for a moment completely taken in by what is really a jeu-d’esprit, the first serious joke perpetrated by Messrs. Macmillan in their publishing capacity.  Perhaps it is too much to call it a joke.  It is a fine, delicate piece of fiction, an imaginative attempt to complete a real romance.  As we had the letters of the academic Romeo, it was obviously right that we should pretend we had the answers of the clever and somewhat mondaine Juliet.  Or is it Juliet herself, in her little Paris boudoir, looking over these two volumes with a sad, cynical smile?  Well, to be put into fiction is always a tribute to one’s reality.

As for extracts from these fascinating forgeries, the letters should be read in conjunction with those of Merimee himself.  It is difficult to judge of them by samples.  We find the Inconnue first in London, probably in 1840.

Little (she writes) can you imagine the storm of indignation you aroused in me by your remark that your feelings for me were those suitable for a fourteen-year-old niece.  Merci.  Anything less like a respectable uncle than yourself I cannot well imagine.  The role would never suit you, believe me, so do not try it.

Now in return for your story of the phlegmatic musical animal who called forth such stormy devotion in a female breast, and who, himself cold and indifferent, was loved to the extent of a watery grave being sought by his inamorata as solace for his indifference, let me ask the question why the women who torment men with their uncertain tempers, drive them wild with jealousy, laugh contemptuously at their humble entreaties, and fling their money to the winds, have twice the hold upon their affections that the patient, long-suffering, domestic, frugal Griseldas have, whose existences are one long penance of unsuccessful efforts to please?  Answer this comprehensively, and you will have solved a riddle which has puzzled women since Eve asked questions in Paradise.

Later on she writes: