[Footnote 1: One of these "adjonctions" is the signature!--TR.]
MY DEAR SISTER,--You understand that I could not speak to you before Eugénie, but I had all my journey to relate to you.
I have found down there all that can flatter the thousand vanities of that animal called man, of whom the poet is certainly the vainest species. But what am I saying? vanity! No, there is nothing of all that. I am happy, very happy in thoughts, in all honor as yet. Alas! a damned husband never left us for one second during five days. He kept between the petticoat of his wife and my waistcoat. [Neufchâtel is] a little town where a woman, an illustrious foreigner, cannot take a step without being seen. I was, as it were, in an oven. Constraint does not suit me.
The essential thing is that we are twenty-seven years old, beautiful to admiration; that we possess the handsomest black hair in the world, the soft, deliciously delicate skin of brunettes, that we have a love of a little hand, a heart of twenty-seven, naïve; [in short, she is] a true Madame de Lignolles, imprudent to the point of flinging herself upon my neck before all the world.
I don't speak to you of colossal wealth. What is that before a masterpiece of beauty, whom I can only compare to the Princess Belle-Joyeuse, but infinitely better? [She possesses] a lingering eye [_œil traînant_] which, when it meets, becomes of voluptuous splendor. I was intoxicated with love.
I don't know whom to tell this to; certainly it is not [possible] either _to her_, the great lady, the terrible marquise, who, suspecting the journey, comes down from her pride, and intimates an order that I shall go to her at the Duc de F.'s [Fitz-James], [nor] is it [possible to tell it either] _to her_, poor, simple, delicious bourgeoise, who is like Blanche d'Azay. I am a _father_,--that's another secret I had to tell you,--and at the head of a pretty little person, the most naïve creature that ever was, fallen like a flower from heaven, who comes to me secretly, exacts no correspondence, and says: "Love me a year; I will love you all my life."
It is not [either] _to her_, the most treasured, who has more jealousy for me than a mother has for the milk she gives her child. She does not like _L'Étrangère_, precisely because _L'Étrangère_ appears to be the very thing for me.