“Darling,” he said to me with the simple frankness which never deserted him, “I had almost gone from life without leaving to Fernand the Barony of Macumer; I must make a new will.  My brother will forgive me; he knows what it is to love!”

I owe my life to the care of my brother-in-law and his wife; they want to carry me off to Spain!

Ah!  Renee, to no one but you can I speak freely of my grief.  A sense of my own faults weighs me to the ground, and there is a bitter solace in pouring them out to you, poor, unheeded Cassandra.  The exactions, the preposterous jealousy, the nagging unrest of my passion wore him to death.  My love was the more fraught with danger for him because we had both the same exquisitely sensitive nature, we spoke the same language, nothing was lost on him, and often the mocking shaft, so carelessly discharged, went straight to his heart.  You can have no idea of the point to which he carried submissiveness.  I had only to tell him to go and leave me alone, and the caprice, however wounding to him, would be obeyed without a murmur.  His last breath was spent in blessing me and in repeating that a single morning alone with me was more precious to him than a lifetime spent with another woman, were she even the Marie of his youth.  My tears fall as I write the words.

This is the manner of my life now.  I rise at midday and go to bed at seven; I linger absurdly long over meals; I saunter about slowly, standing motionless, an hour at a time, before a single plant; I gaze into the leafy trees; I take a sober and serious interest in mere nothings; I long for shade, silence, and night; in a word, I fight through each hour as it comes, and take a gloomy pleasure in adding it to the heap of the vanquished.  My peaceful park gives me all the company I care for; everything there is full of glorious images of my vanished joy, invisible for others but eloquent to me.

“I cannot away with you Spaniards!” I exclaimed one morning, as my sister-in-law flung herself on my neck.  “You have some nobility that we lack.”

Ah!  Renee, if I still live, it is doubtless because Heaven tempers the sense of affliction to the strength of those who have to bear it.  Only a woman can know what it is to lose a love which sprang from the heart and was genuine throughout, a passion which was not ephemeral, and satisfied at once the spirit and the flesh.  How rare it is to find a man so gifted that to worship him brings no sense of degradation!  If such supreme fortune befall us once, we cannot hope for it a second time.  Men of true greatness, whose strength and worth are veiled by poetic grace, and who charm by some high spiritual power, men made to be adored, beware of love!  Love will ruin you, and ruin the woman of your heart.  This is the burden of my cry as I pace my woodland walks.

And he has left me no child!  That love so rich in smiles, which rained perpetual flowers and joy, has left no fruit.  I am a thing accursed.  Can it be that, even as the two extremes of polar ice and torrid sand are alike intolerant of life, so the very purity and vehemence of a single-hearted passion render it barren as hate?  Is it only a marriage of reason, such as yours, which is blessed with a family?  Can Heaven be jealous of our passions?  There are wild words.