“With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt Carabas, added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns, you must keep a carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without paying, since journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so ruinous for those who keep up with the movement of Paris, and since they are constantly invited to dinner, you live as if you had an income of sixty thousand francs a year!  Happy Caroline!  I don’t wonder you forget me!

“I can understand how it is that you have not a moment to yourself.  Your bliss is the cause of your silence, so I pardon you.  Still, if, fatigued with so many pleasures, you one day, upon the summit of your grandeur, think of your poor Claire, write to me, tell me what a marriage with a great man is, describe those great Parisian ladies, especially those who write.  Oh!  I should so much like to know what they are made of!  Finally don’t forget anything, unless you forget that you are loved, as ever, by your poor

“CLAIRE JUGAULT.”

From Madame Adolphe de Chodoreille to Madame la Presidente de la Roulandiere, at Viviers.

“PARIS.

“Ah! my poor Claire, could you have known how many wretched little griefs your innocent letter would awaken, you never would have written it.  Certainly no friend, and not even an enemy, on seeing a woman with a thousand mosquito-bites and a plaster over them, would amuse herself by tearing it off and counting the stings.

“I will begin by telling you that for a woman of twenty-seven, with a face still passable, but with a form a little too much like that of the Emperor Nicholas for the humble part I play, I am happy!  Let me tell you why:  Adolphe, rejoicing in the deceptions which have fallen upon me like a hail-storm, smoothes over the wounds in my self-love by so much affection, so many attentions, and such charming things, that, in good truth, women—­so far as they are simply women—­would be glad to find in the man they marry defects so advantageous.  But all men of letters (Adolphe, alas! is barely a man of letters), who are beings not a bit less irritable, nervous, fickle and eccentric than women, are far from possessing such solid qualities as those of Adolphe, and I hope they have not all been as unfortunate as he.

“Ah!  Claire, we love each other well enough for me to tell you the simple truth.  I have saved my husband, dear, from profound but skillfully concealed poverty.  Far from receiving twenty thousand francs a year, he has not earned that sum in the entire fifteen years that he has been at Paris.  We occupy a third story in the rue Joubert, and pay twelve hundred francs for it; we have some eighty-five hundred francs left, with which I endeavor to keep house honorably.