My dear, my Spaniard is quite adorably melancholy; there is something calm, severe, manly, and mysterious about him which interests me profoundly.  His unvarying solemnity and the silence which envelops him act like an irritant on the mind.  His mute dignity is worthy of a fallen king.  Griffith and I spend our time over him as though he were a riddle.

How odd it is!  A language-master captures my fancy as no other man has done.  Yet by this time I have passed in review all the young men of family, the attaches to embassies, and the ambassadors, generals, and inferior officers, the peers of France, their sons and nephews, the court, and the town.

The coldness of the man provokes me.  The sandy waste which he tries to place, and does place, between us is covered by his deeprooted pride; he wraps himself in mystery.  The hanging back is on his side, the boldness on mine.  This odd situation affords me the more amusement because the whole thing is mere trifling.  What is a man, a Spaniard, and a teacher of languages to me?  I make no account of any man whatever, were he a king.  We are worth far more, I am sure, than the greatest of them.  What a slave I would have made of Napoleon!  If he had loved me, shouldn’t he have felt the whip!

Yesterday I aimed a shaft at M. Henarez which must have touched him to the quick.  He made no reply; the lesson was over, and he bowed with a glance at me, in which I read that he would never return.  This suits me capitally; there would be something ominous in starting an imitation Nouvelle Heloise.  I have just been reading Rousseau’s, and it has left me with a strong distaste for love.  Passion which can argue and moralize seems to me detestable.

Clarissa also is much too pleased with herself and her long, little letter; but Richardson’s work is an admirable picture, my father tells me, of English women.  Rousseau’s seems to me a sort of philosophical sermon, cast in the form of letters.

Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem.  In all that books tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.  And so, my pretty one, as you will henceforth be an authority only on conjugal love, it seems to me my duty—­in the interest, of course, of our common life—­to remain unmarried, and have a grand passion, so that we may enlarge our experience.

Tell me every detail of what happens to you, especially in the first few days, with that strange animal called a husband.  I promise to do the same for you if ever I am loved.

Farewell, poor martyred darling.

XI

MME. DE L’ESTORADE TO MLLE. DE CHAULIEU
La Crampade.

Your Spaniard and you make me shudder, my darling.  I write this line to beg of you to dismiss him.  All that you say of him corresponds with the character of those dangerous adventurers who, having nothing to lose, will take any risk.  This man cannot be your husband, and must not be your lover.  I will write to you more fully about the inner history of my married life when my heart is free from the anxiety your last letter has roused in it.