PARIS, September.
Sweetheart, I too am free! And I am the first too, unless you have
written to Blois, at our sweet tryst of letter-writing.
Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?
Don't go running on like this, you will say, but tell me rather how
you made your escape from the convent where you were to take your
vows. Well, dear, I don't know about the Carmelites, but the miracle
of my own deliverance was, I can assure you, most humdrum. The cries
of an alarmed conscience triumphed over the dictates of a stern policy
—there's the whole mystery. The sombre melancholy which seized me
after you left hastened the happy climax, my aunt did not want to see
me die of a decline, and my mother, whose one unfailing cure for my
malady was a novitiate, gave way before her.
So I am in Paris, thanks to you, my love! Dear Renee, could you have
seen me the day I found myself parted from you, well might you have
gloried in the deep impression you had made on so youthful a bosom. We
had lived so constantly together, sharing our dreams and letting our
fancy roam together, that I verily believe our souls had become welded
together, like those two Hungarian girls, whose death we heard about
from M. Beauvisage—poor misnamed being! Never surely was man better
cut out by nature for the post of convent physician!
Tell me, did you not droop and sicken with your darling?
In my gloomy depression, I could do nothing but count over the ties
which bind us. But it seemed as though distance had loosened them; I
wearied of life, like a turtle-dove widowed of her mate. Death smiled
sweetly on me, and I was proceeding quietly to die. To be at Blois, at
the Carmelites, consumed by dread of having to take my vows there, a
Mlle. de la Valliere, but without her prelude, and without my Renee! How could I not be sick—sick unto death?
How different it used to be! That monotonous existence, where every
hour brings its duty, its prayer, its task, with such desperate
regularity that you can tell what a Carmelite sister is doing in any
place, at any hour of the night or day; that deadly dull routine, which crushes out all interest in one's surroundings, had become for us two a world of life and movement. Imagination had thrown open her fairy realms, and in these our spirits ranged at will, each in turn serving as magic steed to the other, the more alert quickening the drowsy; the world from which our bodies were shut out became the playground of our fancy, which reveled there in frolicsome adventure. The very Lives of the Saints helped us to understand what was so carefully left unsaid! But the day when I was reft of your sweet company, I became a true Carmelite, such as they appeared to us, a modern Danaid, who, instead of trying to fill a bottomless barrel, draws every day, from Heaven knows what deep, an empty pitcher, thinking to find it full.
My aunt knew nothing of this inner life. How could she, who has made a
paradise for herself within the two acres of her convent, understand
my revolt against life? A religious life, if embraced by girls of our
age, demands either an extreme simplicity of soul, such as we, sweetheart, do not possess, or else an ardor for self-sacrifice like that which makes my aunt so noble a character. But she sacrificed herself for a brother to whom she was devoted; to do the same for an unknown person or an idea is surely more than can be asked of mortals.
For the last fortnight I have been gulping down so many reckless
words, burying so many reflections in my bosom, and accumulating such
a store of things to tell, fit for your ear alone, that I should
certainly have been suffocated but for the resource of letter-writing
as a sorry substitute for our beloved talks. How hungry one's heart
gets! I am beginning my journal this morning, and I picture to myself
that yours is already started, and that, in a few days, I shall be at
home in your beautiful Gemenos valley, which I know only through your
descriptions, just as you will live that Paris life, revealed to you
hitherto only in our dreams.