At the risk of exciting your disgust, I must tell you that I persist in the principles I have adopted, and hold myself both heroic and generous in so doing.  Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings.  Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.  Each human life is a substance compacted of widely dissimilar elements, though, viewed from a certain height, the general effect is the same.

If I wished to make Louis unhappy and to bring about a separation, all I need do is to leave the helm in his hands.  I have not had your good fortune in meeting with a man of the highest distinction, but I may perhaps have the satisfaction of helping him on the road to it.  Five years hence let us meet in Paris and see!  I believe we shall succeed in mystifying you.  You will tell me then that I was quite mistaken, and that M. de l’Estorade is a man of great natural gifts.

As for this brave love, of which I know only what you tell me, these tremors and night watches by starlight on the balcony, this idolatrous worship, this deification of woman—­I knew it was not for me.  You can enlarge the borders of your brilliant life as you please; mine is hemmed in to the boundaries of La Crampade.

And you reproach me for the jealous care which alone can nurse this modest and fragile shoot into a wealth of lasting and mysterious happiness!  I believed myself to have found out how to adapt the charm of a mistress to the position of a wife, and you have almost made me blush for my device.  Who shall say which of us is right, which is wrong?  Perhaps we are both right and both wrong.  Perhaps this is the heavy price which society exacts for our furbelows, our titles, and our children.

I too have my red camellias, but they bloom on my lips in smiles for my double charge—­the father and the son—­whose slave and mistress I am.  But, my dear, your last letters made me feel what I have lost!  You have taught me all a woman sacrifices in marrying.  One single glance did I take at those beautiful wild plateaus where you range at your sweet will, and I will not tell you the tears that fell as I read.  But regret is not remorse, though it may be first cousin to it.

You say, “Marriage has made you a philosopher!” Alas! bitterly did I feel how far this was from the truth, as I wept to think of you swept away on love’s torrent.  But my father has made me read one of the profoundest thinkers of these parts, the man on whom the mantle of Boussuet has fallen, one of those hard-headed theorists whose words force conviction.  While you were reading Corinne, I conned Bonald; and here is the whole secret of my philosophy.  He revealed to me the Family in its strength and holiness.  According to Bonald, your father was right in his homily.

Farewell, my dear fancy, my friend, my wild other self.