the Holy Virgin; it comes, or it does not come.  Will the mines of Potosi, or the shedding of our blood, or the making of our fame serve to waken an involuntary, an inexplicable sentiment?  Young men like you, who expect to be loved as the balance of your account, are nothing else than usurers.  Our legitimate wives owe us virtue and children, but they don’t owe us love.

Love, my dear Paul, is the sense of pleasure given and received, and the certainty of giving and receiving it; love is a desire incessantly moving and growing, incessantly satisfied and insatiable.  The day when Vandenesse stirred the cord of a desire in your wife’s heart which you had left untouched, all your self-satisfied affection, your gifts, your deeds, your money, ceased to be even memories; one emotion of love in your wife’s heart has cast out the treasures of your own passion, which are now nothing better than old iron.  Felix has the virtues and the beauties in her eyes, and the simple moral is that blinded by your own love you never made her love you.

Your mother-in-law is on the side of the lover against the husband,—­secretly or not; she may have closed her eyes, or she may have opened them; I know not what she has done—­but one thing is certain, she is for her daughter, and against you.  During the fifteen years that I have observed society, I have never yet seen a mother who, under such circumstances, abandons her daughter.  This indulgence seems to be an inheritance transmitted in the female line.  What man can blame it?  Some copyist of the Civil code, perhaps, who sees formulas only in the place of feelings.

As for your present position, the dissipation into which the life of a fashionable woman cast you, and your own easy nature, possibly your vanity, have opened the way for your wife and her mother to get rid of you by this ruin so skilfully contrived.  From all of which you will conclude, my good friend, that the mission you entrusted to me, and which I would all the more faithfully fulfil because it amused me, is, necessarily, null and void.  The evil you wish me to prevent is accomplished,—­“consummatum est.”

Forgive me, dear friend, if I write to you, as you say, a la de Marsay on subjects which must seem to you very serious.  Far be it from me to dance upon the grave of a friend, like heirs upon that of a progenitor.  But you have written to me that you mean to act the part of a man, and I believe you; I therefore treat you as a man of the world, and not as a lover.  For you, this blow ought to be like the brand on the shoulder of a galley-slave, which flings him forever into a life of systematic opposition to society.  You are now freed of one evil; marriage possessed you; it now behooves you to turn round and possess marriage.

Paul, I am your friend in the fullest acceptation of the word.  If you had a brain in an iron skull, if you had the energy which has