Oh! Renee, you have made me miserable for days! So that bewitching body,
those beautiful proud features, that natural grace of manner, that soul
full of priceless gifts, those eyes, where the soul can slake its thirst
as at a fountain of love, that heart, with its exquisite delicacy,
that breadth of mind, those rare powers--fruit of nature and of
our interchange of thought--treasures whence should issue a unique
satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years,
joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,--all this
is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish
in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate
your children before they are born. They will be monsters!
So you know all that lies before you; you have nothing left to hope,
or fear, or suffer? And supposing the glorious morning rises which will
bring you face to face with the man destined to rouse you from the sleep
into which you are plunging!... Ah! a cold shiver goes through me at the
thought!
Well, at least you have a friend. You, it is understood, are to be the
guardian angel of your valley. You will grow familiar with its beauties,
will live with it in all its aspects, till the grandeur of nature,
the slow growth of vegetation, compared with the lightning rapidity of
thought, become like a part of yourself; and as your eye rests on
the laughing flowers, you will question your own heart. When you walk
between your husband, silent and contented, in front, and your children
screaming and romping behind, I can tell you beforehand what you
will write to me. Your misty valley, your hills, bare or clothed with
magnificent trees, your meadow, the wonder of Provence, with its
fresh water dispersed in little runlets, the different effects of the
atmosphere, this whole world of infinity which laps you round, and which
God has made so various, will recall to you the infinite sameness of
your soul's life. But at least I shall be there, my Renee, and in me you
will find a heart which no social pettiness shall ever corrupt, a heart
all your own.
Monday.
My dear, my Spaniard is quite adorably melancholy; there is something
calm, severe, manly, and mysterious about him which interests me
profoundly. His unvarying solemnity and the silence which envelops him
act like an irritant on the mind. His mute dignity is worthy of a fallen
king. Griffith and I spend our time over him as though he were a riddle.
How odd it is! A language-master captures my fancy as no other man has
done. Yet by this time I have passed in review all the young men of
family, the attaches to embassies, and the ambassadors, generals, and
inferior officers, the peers of France, their sons and nephews, the
court, and the town.
The coldness of the man provokes me. The sandy waste which he tries to
place, and does place, between us is covered by his deeprooted pride; he
wraps himself in mystery. The hanging back is on his side, the boldness
on mine. This odd situation affords me the more amusement because the
whole thing is mere trifling. What is a man, a Spaniard, and a teacher
of languages to me? I make no account of any man whatever, were he a
king. We are worth far more, I am sure, than the greatest of them. What
a slave I would have made of Napoleon! If he had loved me, shouldn't he
have felt the whip!
Yesterday I aimed a shaft at M. Henarez which must have touched him to
the quick. He made no reply; the lesson was over, and he bowed with a
glance at me, in which I read that he would never return. This suits
me capitally; there would be something ominous in starting an imitation
_Nouvelle Heloise_. I have just been reading Rousseau's, and it has left
me with a strong distaste for love. Passion which can argue and moralize
seems to me detestable.
Clarissa also is much too pleased with herself and her long, little
letter; but Richardson's work is an admirable picture, my father tells
me, of English women. Rousseau's seems to me a sort of philosophical
sermon, cast in the form of letters.
Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books
tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.
And so, my pretty one, as you will henceforth be an authority only on
conjugal love, it seems to me my duty--in the interest, of course, of
our common life--to remain unmarried, and have a grand passion, so that
we may enlarge our experience.
Tell me every detail of what happens to you, especially in the first
few days, with that strange animal called a husband. I promise to do the
same for you if ever I am loved.
Farewell, poor martyred darling.