DEAR FRIEND: Since my arrival here I have led the exciting life of an
impresario. I have been author, actor, and stage director. We have
played, with success, a piece which is somewhat immoral, the theme of
which I will tell you on my return. We have had beautiful fireworks,
although a woman who wished to see them too closely was killed outright.
We take long walks, and until the present I have succeeded in escaping
from all these diversions without catching cold.
I shall be held here for another week. I shall remain in Paris,
probably, until early in December, and shall then return to Cannes,
which I left with nature abloom. It is impossible to imagine anything
more beautiful than those fields of jasmines and tuberoses. I am not
feeling very well, and the last few days especially I have been good for
nothing and despondent.
You write to me so laconically, that you never reply to my questions.
You have a way of acting in accordance with your caprices which
perplexes me always; you jest, you make promises; when I read your
letters I fancy I hear your voice speaking. I am disarmed, but in
reality furious.
You tell me nothing about that charming child in whom you are so
interested. Bring her up, I pray you, so that she will not become as
silly as most of the women of our time. Never, I think, has anything
like it been seen. You will tell me what they are in the provinces. If
they are worse than in Paris, I can not imagine in what desert one may
escape them.
We have stopping here Mademoiselle ----, who is a lovely slip of a girl
five feet four inches in height, with all the gracefulness of a
grisette, and a blending of easy manners with sincere timidity which is
sometimes most amusing. Some one expressed apprehension that the second
part of a charade would not equal the introduction (of which I was the
author).
“That is all right,” she said; “we will show our legs in the ballet,
and that will compensate them for everything else.”
N. B.--Her legs are like two pipe-stems, and her feet not exactly
aristocratic.
Good-bye, dear friend....