Louise, for me it was happiness enough to be accepted as your servant.  You have given me the life of which I despaired.  No longer do I draw a useless breath, I have something to spend myself for; my force has an outlet, if only in suffering for you.  Once more I say, as I have said before, that you will never find me other than I was when first I offered myself as your lowly bondman.  Yes, were you dishonored and lost, to use your own words, my heart would only cling the more closely to you for your self-sought misery.  It would be my care to staunch your wounds, and my prayers should importune God with the story of your innocence and your wrongs.

Did I not tell you that the feelings of my heart for you are not a lover’s only, that I will be to you father, mother, sister, brother —­ay, a whole family—­anything or nothing, as you may decree?  And is it not your own wish which has confined within the compass of a lover’s feeling so many varying forms of devotion?  Pardon me, then, if at times the father and brother disappear behind the lover, since you know they are none the less there, though screened from view.  Would that you could read the feelings of my heart when you appear before me, radiant in your beauty, the centre of admiring eyes, reclining calmly in your carriage in the Champs-Elysees, or seated in your box at the Opera!  Then would you know how absolutely free from selfish taint is the pride with which I hear the praises of your loveliness and grace, praises which warm my heart even to the strangers who utter them!  When by chance you have raised me to elysium by a friendly greeting, my pride is mingled with humility, and I depart as though God’s blessing rested on me.  Nor does the joy vanish without leaving a long track of light behind.  It breaks on me through the clouds of my cigarette smoke.  More than ever do I feel how every drop of this surging blood throbs for you.

Can you be ignorant how you are loved?  After seeing you, I return to my study, and the glitter of its Saracenic ornaments sinks to nothing before the brightness of your portrait, when I open the spring that keeps it locked up from every eye and lose myself in endless musings or link my happiness to verse.  From the heights of heaven I look down upon the course of a life such as my hopes dare to picture it!  Have you never, in the silence of the night, or through the roar of the town, heard the whisper of a voice in your sweet, dainty ear?  Does no one of the thousand prayers that I speed to you reach home?

By dint of silent contemplation of your pictured face, I have succeeded in deciphering the expression of every feature and tracing its connection with some grace of the spirit, and then I pen a sonnet to you in Spanish on the harmony of the twofold beauty in which nature has clothed you.  These sonnets you will never see, for my poetry is too unworthy of its theme, I dare not send it to you.  Not a moment passes without thoughts of you, for my whole being is bound up in you, and if you ceased to be its animating principle, every part would ache.