“Poor boy!” said Bixiou.  “I said you had gone to Sancerre to turn Pegasus out to grass.”

“Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome,” retorted Lousteau.  “Ask Bianchon, my dear fellow.”

“A Muse and a Poet!  A homoeopathic cure then!” said Bixiou.

On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-mark.

“Good! very good!” said Lousteau.

“‘Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul——­’ twenty pages of it! all at one sitting, and dated midnight!  She writes when she finds herself alone.  Poor woman!  Ah, ha!  And a postscript—­

“’I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my mind.’—­What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written,” said Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire after having read them.  “That woman was born to reel off copy!”

Lousteau was not much afraid of Madame Schontz, who really loved him for himself, but he had supplanted a friend in the heart of a Marquise.  This Marquise, a lady nowise coy, sometimes dropped in unexpectedly at his rooms in the evening, arriving veiled in a hackney coach; and she, as a literary woman, allowed herself to hunt through all his drawers.

A week later, Lousteau, who hardly remembered Dinah, was startled by another budget from Sancerre—­eight leaves, sixteen pages!  He heard a woman’s step; he thought it announced a search from the Marquise, and tossed these rapturous and entrancing proofs of affections into the fire—­unread!

“A woman’s letter!” exclaimed Madame Schontz, as she came in.  “The paper, the wax, are scented—­”

“Here you are, sir,” said a porter from the coach office, setting down two huge hampers in the ante-room.  “Carriage paid.  Please to sign my book.”

“Carriage paid!” cried Madame Schontz.  “It must have come from Sancerre.”

“Yes, madame,” said the porter.

“Your Tenth Muse is a remarkably intelligent woman,” said the courtesan, opening one of the hampers, while Lousteau was writing his name.  “I like a Muse who understands housekeeping, and who can make game pies as well as blots.  And, oh! what beautiful flowers!” she went on, opening the second hamper.  “Why, you could get none finer in Paris!—­And here, and here!  A hare, partridges, half a roebuck!—­We will ask your friends and have a famous dinner, for Athalie has a special talent for dressing venison.”

Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was clever.  The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of Mirabeau’s letters to Sophie.  The style of a true lover is transparent.  It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty—­but only for two beings.  As soon as a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the product of the head, not of the heart.  But a woman will always be beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of this flow of wit.