Louis’ temper remains as perfect as ever; his love is of the active, my tenderness of the passive, type.  He is happy, plucking the flowers which bloom for him, without troubling about the labor of the earth which has produced them.  Blessed self-absorption!  At whatever cost to myself, I fall in with his illusions, as a mother, in my idea of her, should be ready to spend herself to satisfy a fancy of her child.  The intensity of his joy blinds him, and even throws its reflection upon me.  The smile or look of satisfaction which the knowledge of his content brings to my face is enough to satisfy him.  And so, “my child” is the pet name which I give him when we are alone.

And I wait for the fruit of all these sacrifices which remain a secret between God, myself, and you.  On motherhood I have staked enormously; my credit account is now too large, I fear I shall never receive full payment.  To it I look for employment of my energy, expansion of my heart, and the compensation of a world of joys.  Pray Heaven I be not deceived!  It is a question of all my future and, horrible thought, of my virtue.

XXI

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE L’ESTORADE
June.

Dear wedded sweetheart,—­Your letter has arrived at the very moment to hearten me for a bold step which I have been meditating night and day.  I feel within me a strange craving for the unknown, or, if you will, the forbidden, which makes me uneasy and reveals a conflict in progress in my soul between the laws of society and of nature.  I cannot tell whether nature in me is the stronger of the two, but I surprise myself in the act of meditating between the hostile powers.

In plain words, what I wanted was to speak with Felipe, alone, at night, under the lime-trees at the bottom of our garden.  There is no denying that this desire beseems the girl who has earned the epithet of an “up-to-date young lady,” bestowed on me by the Duchess in jest, and which my father has approved.

Yet to me there seems a method in this madness.  I should recompense Felipe for the long nights he has passed under my window, at the same time that I should test him, by seeing what he thinks of my escapade and how he comports himself at a critical moment.  Let him cast a halo round my folly—­behold in him my husband; let him show one iota less of the tremulous respect with which he bows to me in the Champs-Elysees—­farewell, Don Felipe.

As for society, I run less risk in meeting my lover thus than when I smile to him in the drawing-rooms of Mme. de Maufrigneuse and the old Marquise de Beauseant, where spies now surround us on every side; and Heaven only knows how people stare at the girl, suspected of a weakness for a grotesque, like Macumer.

I cannot tell you to what a state of agitation I am reduced by dreaming of this idea, and the time I have given to planning its execution.  I wanted you badly.  What happy hours we should have chattered away, lost in the mazes of uncertainty, enjoying in anticipation all the delights and horrors of a first meeting in the silence of night, under the noble lime-trees of the Chaulieu mansion, with the moonlight dancing through the leaves!  As I sat alone, every nerve tingling, I cried, “Oh!  Renee, where are you?” Then your letter came, like a match to gunpowder, and my last scruples went by the board.