XIX

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L’ESTORADE

Well, my Renee, you are a love of a woman, and I quite agree now that we can only be virtuous by cheating.  Will that satisfy you?  Moreover, the man who loves us is our property; we can make a fool or a genius of him as we please; only, between ourselves, the former happens more commonly.  You will make yours a genius, and you won’t tell the secret —­there are two heroic actions, if you will!

Ah! if there were no future life, how nicely you would be sold, for this is martyrdom into which you are plunging of your own accord.  You want to make him ambitious and to keep him in love!  Child that you are, surely the last alone is sufficient.

Tell me, to what point is calculation a virtue, or virtue calculation?  You won’t say?  Well, we won’t quarrel over that, since we have Bonald to refer to.  We are, and intend to remain, virtuous; nevertheless at this moment I believe that you, with all your pretty little knavery, are a better woman than I am.

Yes, I am shockingly deceitful.  I love Felipe, and I conceal it from him with an odious hypocrisy.  I long to see him leap from his tree to the top of the wall, and from the wall to my balcony—­and if he did, how I should wither him with my scorn!  You see, I am frank enough with you.

What restrains me?  Where is the mysterious power which prevents me from telling Felipe, dear fellow, how supremely happy he has made me by the outpouring of his love—­so pure, so absolute, so boundless, so unobtrusive, and so overflowing?

Mme. de Mirbel is painting my portrait, and I intend to give it to him, my dear.  What surprises me more and more every day is the animation which love puts into life.  How full of interest is every hour, every action, every trifle! and what amazing confusion between the past, the future, and the present!  One lives in three tenses at once.  Is it still so after the heights of happiness are reached?  Oh! tell me, I implore you, what is happiness?  Does it soothe, or does it excite?  I am horribly restless; I seem to have lost all my bearings; a force in my heart drags me to him, spite of reason and spite of propriety.  There is this gain, that I am better able to enter into your feelings.

Felipe’s happiness consists in feeling himself mine; the aloofness of his love, his strict obedience, irritate me, just as his attitude of profound respect provoked me when he was only my Spanish master.  I am tempted to cry out to him as he passes, “Fool, if you love me so much as a picture, what will it be when you know the real me?”

Oh!  Renee, you burn my letters, don’t you?  I will burn yours.  If other eyes than ours were to read these thoughts which pass from heart to heart, I should send Felipe to put them out, and perhaps to kill the owners, by way of additional security.

Monday.