Is my ideal portrait, then, forgotten?  Your excessive cheerfulness was redolent of your love.  Had it not been for a restraining glance from me, you would have proclaimed to the most sharp-sighted, keen-witted, and unsparing of Paris salons, that your inspiration was drawn from Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu.

I believe in your greatness too much to think for a moment that your love is ruled by policy; but if you did not show a childlike simplicity when with me, I could only pity you.  Spite of this first fault, you are still deeply admired by LOUISE DE CHAULIEU.

XXIII

FELIPE TO LOUISE

When God beholds our faults, He sees also our repentance.  Yes, my beloved mistress, you are right.  I felt that I had displeased you, but knew not how.  Now that you have explained the cause of your trouble, I find in it fresh motive to adore you.  Like the God of Israel, you are a jealous deity, and I rejoice to see it.  For what is holier and more precious than jealousy?  My fair guardian angel, jealousy is an ever-wakeful sentinel; it is to love what pain is to the body, the faithful herald of evil.  Be jealous of your servant, Louise, I beg of you; the harder you strike, the more contrite will he be and kiss the rod, in all submission, which proves that he is not indifferent to you.

But, alas! dear, if the pains it cost me to vanquish my timidity and master feelings you thought so feeble were invisible to you, will Heaven, think you, reward them?  I assure you, it needed no slight effort to show myself to you as I was in the days before I loved.  At Madrid I was considered a good talker, and I wanted you to see for yourself the few gifts I may possess.  If this were vanity, it has been well punished.

Your last glance utterly unnerved me.  Never had I so quailed, even when the army of France was at the gates of Cadiz and I read peril for my life in the dissembling words of my royal master.  Vainly I tried to discover the cause of your displeasure, and the lack of sympathy between us which this fact disclosed was terrible to me.  For in truth I have no wish but to act by your will, think your thoughts, see with your eyes, respond to your joy and suffering, as my body responds to heat and cold.  The crime and the anguish lay for me in the breach of unison in that common life of feeling which you have made so fair.

“I have vexed her!” I exclaimed over and over again, like one distraught.  My noble, my beautiful Louise, if anything could increase the fervor of my devotion or confirm my belief in your delicate moral intuitions, it would be the new light which your words have thrown upon my own feelings.  Much in them, of which my mind was formerly but dimly conscious, you have now made clear.  If this be designed as chastisement, what can be the sweetness of your rewards?