Your reproaches please me greatly. I am, indeed, predestined by the
fairies. I ask myself often what I am to you, and what you are to me. To
the first question I can have no reply; as for the second, I fancy that
I love you as if you were a fourteen-year-old niece of whom I were the
guardian. As for your exceedingly moral relative, who has so much ill to
say of me, he reminds me of Thwackum, who is always saying, “Can any
virtue exist without religion?” Have you read _Tom Jones_?--a book as
immoral as all of mine together. If it has been forbidden you, I am
confident you have read it. What a farce of an education is that which
you are getting in England! What does it amount to? People lose their
breath preaching to a young girl, and the result is that this young girl
desires to know the identical immoral being for whom people flatter
themselves they have given her an aversion. What an admirable story is
that of the serpent! I wish Lady M---- could read this letter.
Fortunately, she would faint about the tenth line.
Turning the page, I have reread what I have just written, and it seems
to me that there is very little coherence and connection of ideas. That
is a fault of mine, but I write just as I think, and as my thoughts are
more rapid than my pen, the consequence is that I am forced to omit all
the transitions. I should, perhaps, follow your example, and erase all
the first page; but I prefer to resign it to you for reflection and
curl-papers. I must confess, too, that just at this moment I am deeply
absorbed in an affair which, I avow to my shame, dwells stubbornly in
one-half of my brain, while the other half is entirely filled with you.
The portrait which you draw of yourself I like tolerably well. It does
not flatter you any too much, and all that I know of you pleases me
prodigiously....
I am studying you with the liveliest curiosity. I have theories about
the most trifling things, about gloves, about boots, about curls, etc.,
and I attach great importance to such things, because I have discovered
that there is an actual relation between the temperament of women and
the caprice (or, to express it better, the connection of ideas and the
reasoning) which causes them to choose such and such a fabric. Thus, for
instance, it is for me to have demonstrated that a woman who wears blue
gowns is a coquette, and poses as a sentimentalist. The demonstration
is easy, but it would take too long. How should you like it if I were to
send you a wretchedly bad water-colour, larger than this sheet, and
which could be neither rolled nor folded? Wait until I can make you a
smaller one, that can be sent in a letter.
The other day I went sailing. On the river there were any number of
little sail-boats, carrying all sorts of people. There was one very
large boat in which were several women of questionable manners. All
these boats had landed, and from the largest stepped a man about forty
years old, who was amusing himself by playing on a tambourine. While I
was admiring the musical talent of this creature, a woman of perhaps
twenty-three, approached him, calling him a monster, telling him that
she had followed him from Paris, and that if he would not allow her to
join him he would repent it. All this occurred on the bank, about twenty
feet from our boat. The man with the tambourine continued playing while
the deserted woman was thus holding forth, and with the utmost
indifference replied that he did not intend to have her in his boat;
whereupon she climbed out to the boat moored farthest from the bank, and
threw herself into the river, splashing us abominably. Although she had
extinguished my cigar, indignation did not deter me, or my friends
either, from pulling her out of the water before she had been in it long
enough to swallow two glasses. The beauteous object of all this despair
had not so much as budged, and murmured between his teeth, “Why rescue
her, when she wished to drown herself?” We took the woman to an inn, and
as it was getting late, and it was almost dinner-time, we left her to
the care of the tavernkeeper’s wife.
How does it happen that the most indifferent men are the best beloved by
women? This is what I asked myself as I sailed down the Seine, what I am
still asking myself, and what I beg you to tell me, if you know.
Good-bye. Write to me often; let us be friends, and pardon the
incoherence of my letter. Some day I will explain the reason.