Nature has favored our sex in giving us a choice between love and motherhood.  I have made mine.  My children shall be my gods, and this spot of earth my Eldorado.

I can say no more to-day.  Thank you much for all the things you have sent me.  Give a glance at my needs on the enclosed list.  I am determined to live in an atmosphere of refinement and luxury, and to take from provincial life only what makes its charm.  In solitude a woman can never be vulgarized—­she remains herself.  I count greatly on your kindness for keeping me up to the fashion.  My father-in-law is so delighted that he can refuse me nothing, and turns his house upside down.  We are getting workpeople from Paris and renovating everything.

X

MLLE. DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L’ESTORADE
January.

Oh!  Renee, you have made me miserable for days!  So that bewitching body, those beautiful proud features, that natural grace of manner, that soul full of priceless gifts, those eyes, where the soul can slake its thirst as at a fountain of love, that heart, with its exquisite delicacy, that breadth of mind, those rare powers—­fruit of nature and of our interchange of thought—­treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—­all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath!  I hate your children before they are born.  They will be monsters!

So you know all that lies before you; you have nothing left to hope, or fear, or suffer?  And supposing the glorious morning rises which will bring you face to face with the man destined to rouse you from the sleep into which you are plunging! . . .  Ah! a cold shiver goes through me at the thought!

Well, at least you have a friend.  You, it is understood, are to be the guardian angel of your valley.  You will grow familiar with its beauties, will live with it in all its aspects, till the grandeur of nature, the slow growth of vegetation, compared with the lightning rapidity of thought, become like a part of yourself; and as your eye rests on the laughing flowers, you will question your own heart.  When you walk between your husband, silent and contented, in front, and your children screaming and romping behind, I can tell you beforehand what you will write to me.  Your misty valley, your hills, bare or clothed with magnificent trees, your meadow, the wonder of Provence, with its fresh water dispersed in little runlets, the different effects of the atmosphere, this whole world of infinity which laps you round, and which God has made so various, will recall to you the infinite sameness of your soul’s life.  But at least I shall be there, my Renee, and in me you will find a heart which no social pettiness shall ever corrupt, a heart all your own.

Monday.