The last one was called 1870.  One sees in it, Isidore with Antonelli commanding the brigands of Calabria, trying to regain his throne and to re-establish the papacy.  Everything is in the future; at the end the widow Euphemia marries the Grand Turk, the only remaining sovereign.  It is true that he is a former Democrat and is recognized as none other than the great tumbler Coquenbois when unmasked.  These plays last till two o’clock in the morning and we are crazy on coming out of them.  We sup till five o’clock.  There is a performance twice a week, and the rest of the time they make the properties, and the play continues with the same characters, going through the most incredible adventures.

The public is composed of eight or ten young people, my three great nephews, and sons of my old friends.  They get excited to the point of yelling.  Aurore is not admitted; the plays are not suited to her age.  As for me, I am so amused that I become exhausted.  I am sure that you would be madly amused by it also; for there is a splendid fire and abandon in these improvisations; and the characters done by Maurice have the appearance of living beings, of a burlesque life that is real and impossible at the same time; it seems like a dream.  That is how I have been living for the ten days that I have not been working.

Maurice gives me this recreation in my intervals of repose that coincide with his.  He brings to it as much ardor and passion as to his science.  He has a truly charming nature and one never gets bored with him.  His wife is also charming, quite large just now, always moving, busying herself with everything, lying down on the sofa twenty times a day, getting up to run after her child, her cook, her husband, who demands a lot of things for his theatre, coming back to lie down again; crying out that she feels ill and bursting into shrieks of laughter at a fly that circles about; sewing layettes, reading the papers with fervor, reading novels which make her weep; weeping also at the marionettes when there is a little sentiment, for there is some of that too.  In short a personality and a type:  she sings ravishingly, she gets angry, she gets tender, she makes succulent dainties to surprise us with, and every day of our vacation there is a little fete which she organizes.

Little Aurore promises to be very sweet and calm, understanding in a marvelous manner what is said to her and Yielding to reason at two years of age.  It is very extraordinary and I have never seen it before.  It would be disquieting if one did not feel a great serenity in that little brain.

But how I am gossiping with you!  Does all this amuse you?  I should like this chatty letter to substitute for one of those suppers of ours which I too regret, and which would be so good here with you, if you were not a stick-in-the-mud, who won’t let yourself be dragged away to life for life’s sake.  Ah! when one is on a vacation, how work, logic, reason seem strange contrasts!  One asks whether one can ever return to that ball and chain.