may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your affection only to betray it.  By such a man your letter would be interpreted otherwise than it is by me.  He would see a thought that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not suspected.  There are as many natures as there are writers.  I am deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer, one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms, perhaps a hero of some gay resort.  In the bower of clematis where you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which drives all poetry from the manuscript?

But let us look still further.  How could the dreamy, solitary life you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all?  What reality can equal imagination?  The young girls of the poets are so ideal that no living daughter of Eve can compete with them.  And now tell me, what will you gain,—­you, a young girl, brought up to be the virtuous mother of a family,—­if you learn to comprehend the terrible agitations of a poet’s life in this dreadful capital, which may be defined by one sentence,—­the hell in which men love.

If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of degradation?  What meaning am I to give to your letter?  Are you one of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?  Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence?  Alas, alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous.  You have said too much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.  Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it, tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.

But, mademoiselle, if you are young, if you are beautiful, if you have a home, a family, if in your heart you have the precious ointment, the spikenard, to pour out, as did Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, let yourself be won by a man worthy of you; become what every pure young girl should be,—­a good woman, the virtuous mother of a family.  A poet is the saddest conquest that a girl can make; he is full of vanity, full of angles that will sharply wound a woman’s proper pride, and kill a tenderness which has no experience of life.  The wife of a poet should love him long before she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels, to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood.  Such qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs in a young girl.

Hear the whole truth,—­do I