第32章 LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MME.DE L'ESTORADE March(1)

Ah!my love,marriage is making a philosopher of you!Your darling face must,indeed,have been jaundiced when you wrote me those terrible views of human life and the duty of women.Do you fancy you will convert me to matrimony by your programme of subterranean labors?

Alas!is this then the outcome for you of our too-instructed dreams!

We left Blois all innocent,armed with the pointed shafts of meditation,and,lo!the weapons of that purely ideal experience have turned against your own breast!If I did not know you for the purest and most angelic of created beings,I declare I should say that your calculations smack of vice.What,my dear,in the interest of your country home,you submit your pleasures to a periodic thinning,as you do your timber.Oh!rather let me perish in all the violence of the heart's storms than live in the arid atmosphere of your cautious arithmetic!

As girls,we were both unusually enlightened,because of the large amount of study we gave to our chosen subjects;but,my child,philosophy without love,or disguised under a sham love,is the most hideous of conjugal hypocrisies.I should imagine that even the biggest of fools might detect now and again the owl of wisdom squatting in your bower of roses--a ghastly phantom sufficient to put to flight the most promising of passions.You make your own fate,instead of waiting,a plaything in its hands.

We are each developing in strange ways.A large dose of philosophy to a grain of love is your recipe;a large dose of love to a grain of philosophy is mine.Why,Rousseau's Julie,whom I thought so learned,is a mere beginner to you.Woman's virtue,quotha!How you have weighed up life!Alas!I make fun of you,and,after all,perhaps you are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser before your time.Your Louis will be happy,I daresay.If he loves you,of which I make no doubt,he will never find out,that,for the sake of your family,you are acting as a courtesan does for money;and certainly men seem to find happiness with them,judging by the fortunes they squander thus.A keen-sighted husband might no doubt remain in love with you,but what sort of gratitude could he feel in the long run for a woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral armor,as indispensable as her stays?

Love,dear,is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues,conformed to the divine likeness.Like all other first principles,it is not a matter of arithmetic;it is the Infinite in us.I cannot but think you have been trying to justify in your own eyes the frightful position of a girl,married to a man for whom she feels nothing more than esteem.You prate of duty,and make it your rule and measure;but surely to take necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory of atheism?To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.You are acting a man's part,and your Louis will have to play the woman!

Oh!my dear,your letter has plunged me into an endless train of thought.I see now that the convent can never take the place of mother to a girl.I beg of you,my grand angel with the black eyes,so pure and proud,so serious and so pretty,do not turn away from these cries,which the first reading of your letter has torn from me!I have taken comfort in the thought that,while I was lamenting,love was doubtless busy knocking down the scaffolding of reason.

It may be that I shall do worse than you without any reasoning or calculations.Passion is an element in life bound to have a logic not less pitiless than yours.

Monday.

Yesterday night I placed myself at the window as I was going to bed,to look at the sky,which was wonderfully clear.The stars were like silver nails,holding up a veil of blue.In the silence of the night Icould hear some one breathing,and by the half-light of the stars Isaw my Spaniard,perched like a squirrel on the branches of one of the trees lining the boulevard,and doubtless lost in admiration of my windows.

The first effect of this discovery was to make me withdraw into the room,my feet and hands quite limp and nerveless;but,beneath the fear,I was conscious of a delicious undercurrent of joy.I was overpowered but happy.Not one of those clever Frenchmen,who aspire to marry me,has had the brilliant idea of spending the night in an elm-tree at the risk of being carried off by the watch.My Spaniard has,no doubt,been there for some time.Ah!he won't give me any more lessons,he wants to receive them--well,he shall have one.If only he knew what I said to myself about his superficial ugliness!Others can philosophize besides you,Renee!It was horrid,I argued,to fall in love with a handsome man.Is it not practically avowing that the senses count for three parts out of four in a passion which ought to be super-sensual?

Having got over my first alarm,I craned my neck behind the window in order to see him again--and well was I rewarded!By means of a hollow cane he blew me in through the window a letter,cunningly rolled round a leaden pellet.

Good Heavens!will he suppose I left the window open on purpose?

But what was to be done?To shut it suddenly would be to make oneself an accomplice.

I did better.I returned to my window as though I had seen nothing and heard nothing of the letter,then I said aloud:

"Come and look at the stars,Griffith."

Griffith was sleeping as only old maids can.But the Moor,hearing me,slid down,and vanished with ghostly rapidity.

He must have been dying of fright,and so was I,for I did not hear him go away;apparently he remained at the foot of the elm.After a good quarter of an hour,during which I lost myself in contemplation of the heavens,and battled with the waves of curiosity,I closed my widow and sat down on the bed to unfold the delicate bit of paper,with the tender touch of a worker amongst the ancient manus at Naples.It felt redhot to my fingers."What a horrible power this man has over me!"I said to myself.