Seeing these three handsome men standing there, all three so elegant, so distinguished!  A wicked sentiment of female vanity crossed my mind; and I said to myself with miserable pride and triumph:  “All three love me ...  All three are thinking of me!” ...  Oh!  I have been cruelly punished for this contemptible vanity.  Alas! one of the three did not love me—­and he was the one I loved—­one of them did not think of me, and he was the one that filled my every thought.  Another sentiment more noble than the first, saddened my heart.  I said:  “Here are three devoted friends ... perhaps they will soon be bitter enemies ... and I the cause.”  O Valentine! you cannot imagine how sad and despondent I am.  Do not desert me now that I most need your comforting sympathy!  Burn my last letter, I entreat you.

IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN.

XXIV.

EDGAR DE MEILHAN to MADAME GUERIN,
Pont de l’Arche (Eure).

RICHEPORT, July 10th 18—.

Three times have I been to the post-office since you left the chateau in such an abrupt and inexplicable manner.  I am lost in conjecture about your sudden departure, which was both unnecessary and unprepared.  It is doubtless because you do not wish to tell me the reason that you refuse to see me.  I know that you are still at Pont de l’Arche, and that you have never left Madame Taverneau’s house.  So that when she tells me in a measured and mysterious tone that you have been absent for some time; looking at the closed door of your room, behind which I divine your presence, I am seized with an insane desire to kick down the narrow plank which separates me from you.  Fits of gloomy passion possess me which illogical obstacles and unjust resistance always excite.

What have I done?  What can you have against me?  Let me at least know the crime for which I am punished.  On the scaffold they always read the victim his sentence, equitable or otherwise.  Will you be more cruel than a hangman?  Read me my sentence.  Nothing is more frightful than to be executed in a dungeon without knowing for what offence.

For three days—­three eternities—­I have taxed my memory to an alarming extent.  I have recalled everything that I have said for the last two weeks, word by word, syllable for syllable, endeavoring to give to each expression its intonation, its inflection, its sharps and flats.  Every different signification that the music of the voice could give to a thought, I have analyzed, debated, commented upon twenty times a day.  Not a word, accent nor gesture has enlightened me.  I defy the most embittered and envious spirit to find anything that could offend the most susceptible pride, the haughtiest majesty.  Nothing has occurred in my familiar intercourse with you that would alarm a sensitive plant or a mimosa.  Therefore, such cannot be the motive for your panic-stricken flight.  I am young, ardent, impetuous; I attach no importance to certain social conventionalities, but I feel confident that I have never failed in a religious respect for the holiness of love and modesty.  I love you—­I could never, wilfully, have offended you.  How could my eyes and lips have expressed what was neither in my head nor in my heart?  If there is no fire without smoke, as a natural consequence there can be no smoke without fire!