you charming; perhaps, by virtue of seeing you often, I should have
found you detestable.--Forgive that supposition.--By living with you
on terms of close intimacy, I should have occasion, I doubt not, to
see you in a cotton night-cap or in some absurd or grotesque domestic
situation.--You would necessarily have lost the romantic and mysterious
side that charms me above all things, and your character, being better
understood, would no longer have seemed so unique to me. I should be
less engrossed with you, having you near me, just as it happens with
books that one never opens because one has them in his library.--Your
nose or your mind would no longer seem to me nearly as well turned; I
should notice that your coat didn't fit you, or that your stockings
weren't drawn tight; I should have a thousand disillusionments of that
sort which would have made me very unhappy, and I should have come at
last to this conclusion!--that you certainly had neither heart nor
soul, and that I was destined not to be understood in the matter of
love.
You adore me and I reciprocate the feeling. You have not the slightest
reason to reproach me, and I have not the slightest complaint to make
of you. I have been perfectly faithful to you throughout our whole
_liaison._ I have deceived you in nothing.--I had neither a false bosom
nor false virtue; you had the extreme kindness to tell me that I was
even more beautiful than you imagined.--In return for the beauty I gave
you, you gave me much pleasure; we are quits;--I go my way and you
yours, and perhaps we shall meet again at the Antipodes.--Live in that
hope.
You think perhaps that I do not love because I leave you. Later you
will realize how far that is true.--If I had cared less for you, I
would have remained and poured out the insipid draught for you to the
dregs. Your love would soon have been dead of ennui; after some time
you would have entirely forgotten me, and as you read my name on the
list of your conquests, you would have asked yourself: "Who the devil
was she?"--I have at least the satisfaction of thinking that you will
remember me more than some others.--Your unsatisfied desire will still
spread its wings to fly to me; I shall always be to you something
desirable to which your fancy will love to return, and I hope that
in the bed of the mistresses you may have hereafter, you will think
sometimes of the single night you passed with me.
You will never be more lovable than you were on that blessed evening,
and even if you should be as much so, that would show a falling-off;
for in love, as in poetry, to remain at the same point is to
retrograde. Cling to that impression--you will do well.
You have made the task of such lovers as I may have--if I have other
lovers--a difficult one, and no one will ever be able to efface my
memory of you;--they will be the heirs of Alexander.
If it grieves you too deeply to lose me, burn this letter, which is
the only proof that you have had me, and you will think you have had
a pleasant dream. What is there to prevent that? The vision vanished
before dawn, just at the hour when dreams return home through the doors
of horn or ivory.--How many men have died, less fortunate than you,
without giving so much as a single kiss to their chimera!
I am neither whimsical nor mad nor prudish.--What I do is the result of
profound conviction.--It was not to inflame your passion or from any
deep design of coquetry that I left C----; do not try to follow me or
to find me: you will not succeed. My precautions to conceal my tracks
from you are too well taken; you will always be, in my mind, the man
who opened to me a world of novel sensations. Those are things a woman
doesn't readily forget. Although absent, I shall think of you often,
more often than if you were with me.
Do your best to console poor Rosette, who is likely to be at least as
grieved as you at my departure. Love each other well in memory of me,
whom you have both loved, and mention my name sometimes in a kiss.