The chalet, my dear, is a good, solid house, with its heating system and all the conveniences of modern architecture, which can raise a palace in the compass of a hundred square feet.  It contains a suite of rooms for Gaston and another for me.  The ground-floor is occupied by an ante-room, a parlor, and a dining room.  Above our floor again are three rooms destined for the nurseries.  I have five first-rate horses, a small light coupe, and a two-horse cabriolet.  We are only forty-minutes’ drive from Paris; so that, when the spirit moves us to hear an opera or see a new play, we can start after dinner and return the same night to our bower.  The road is a good one, and passes under the shade of our green dividing wall.

My servants—­cook, coachman, groom, and gardeners, in addition to my maid—­are all very respectable people, whom I have spent the last six months in picking up, and they will be superintended by my old Philippe.  Although confident of their loyalty and good faith, I have not neglected to cultivate self-interest; their wages are small, but will receive an annual addition in the shape of a New Year’s Day present.  They are all aware that the slightest fault, or a mere suspicion of gossiping, might lose them a capital place.  Lovers are never troublesome to their servants; they are indulgent by disposition, and therefore I feel that I can reckon on my household.

All that is choice, pretty, or decorative in my house in the Rue du Bac has been transported to the chalet.  The Rembrandt hangs on the staircase, as though it were a mere daub; the Hobbema faces the Rubens in his study; the Titian, which my sister-in-law Mary sent me from Madrid, adorns the boudoir.  The beautiful furniture picked up by Felipe looks very well in the parlor, which the architect has decorated most tastefully.  Everything at the chalet is charmingly simple, with the simplicity which can’t be got under a hundred thousand francs.  Our ground-floor rests on cellars, which are built of millstone and embedded in concrete; it is almost completely buried in flowers and shrubs, and is deliciously cool without a vestige of damp.  To complete the picture, a fleet of white swans sail over my lake!

Oh!  Renee, the silence which reigns in this valley would bring joy to the dead!  One is awakened by the birds singing or the breeze rustling in the poplars.  A little spring, discovered by the architect in digging the foundations of the wall, trickles down the hillside over silvery sand to the lake, between two banks of water-cress, hugging the edge of the woods.  I know nothing that money can buy to equal it.

May not Gaston come to loathe this too perfect bliss?  I shudder to think how complete it is, for the ripest fruits harbor the worms, the most gorgeous flowers attract the insects.  Is it not ever the monarch of the forest which is eaten away by the fatal brown grub, greedy as death?  I have learned before now that an unseen and jealous power attacks happiness which has reached perfection.  Besides, this is the moral of all your preaching, and you have been proved a prophet.