The only thing I have taken for myself, dear brother, is my happiness.  I have taken Marie.  For this I shall always be beholden to you, as the creature to the Creator.  There will be in my life and in Marie’s one day not less glorious than our wedding day—­it will be the day when we hear that your heart has found its mate, that a woman loves you as you ought to be, and would be, loved.  Do not forget that if you live for us, we also live for you.

You can write to us with perfect confidence under cover to the Nuncio, sending your letters via Rome.  The French ambassador at Rome will, no doubt, undertake to forward them to Monsignore Bemboni, at the State Secretary’s office, whom our legate will have advised.  No other way would be safe.  Farewell, dear exile, dear despoiled one.  Be proud at least of the happiness which you have brought to us, if you cannot be happy in it.  God will doubtless hear our prayers, which are full of your name.

XV

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L’ESTORADE
March.

Ah! my love, marriage is making a philosopher of you!  Your darling face must, indeed, have been jaundiced when you wrote me those terrible views of human life and the duty of women.  Do you fancy you will convert me to matrimony by your programme of subterranean labors?

Alas! is this then the outcome for you of our too-instructed dreams!  We left Blois all innocent, armed with the pointed shafts of meditation, and, lo! the weapons of that purely ideal experience have turned against your own breast!  If I did not know you for the purest and most angelic of created beings, I declare I should say that your calculations smack of vice.  What, my dear, in the interest of your country home, you submit your pleasures to a periodic thinning, as you do your timber.  Oh! rather let me perish in all the violence of the heart’s storms than live in the arid atmosphere of your cautious arithmetic!

As girls, we were both unusually enlightened, because of the large amount of study we gave to our chosen subjects; but, my child, philosophy without love, or disguised under a sham love, is the most hideous of conjugal hypocrisies.  I should imagine that even the biggest of fools might detect now and again the owl of wisdom squatting in your bower of roses—­a ghastly phantom sufficient to put to flight the most promising of passions.  You make your own fate, instead of waiting, a plaything in its hands.

We are each developing in strange ways.  A large dose of philosophy to a grain of love is your recipe; a large dose of love to a grain of philosophy is mine.  Why, Rousseau’s Julie, whom I thought so learned, is a mere beginner to you.  Woman’s virtue, quotha!  How you have weighed up life!  Alas!  I make fun of you, and, after all, perhaps you are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser before your time.  Your Louis will be happy, I daresay.  If he loves you, of which I make no doubt, he will never find out, that, for the sake of your family, you are acting as a courtesan does for money; and certainly men seem to find happiness with them, judging by the fortunes they squander thus.  A keen-sighted husband might no doubt remain in love with you, but what sort of gratitude could he feel in the long run for a woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral armor, as indispensable as her stays?