Who is this poor convalescent whose wound caused you so much anxiety?  You don’t tell me his name!  I understand you, Madame!  Even to an old friend you must show your administrative discretion!

Is this wounded hero young?  I suppose he is, as you do not say he is old.  He is “about to leave, and return to his home;” “his home” is rather vague, as you don’t tell me his name!  Now, I am different from you; I name and fully describe every one I meet, you respond with enigmas.

I well know that your destiny is fulfilled, and that mine has all the attractiveness of a new romance.  Nevertheless, you must be more communicative if you expect to be continued in office as my confidant.

Embrace for me your dear little ones, whom I insist upon regarding as your best counsellors at the prefecture, and tell my goddaughter, Irene, to kiss you for me.

IRENE DE CHATEAUDUN.

VIII.

EDGAR DE MEILHAN to the PRINCE DE MONBERT,
Saint Dominique street, Paris.

RICHEPORT, May 31st, 18—.

Now that you are a sort of Amadis de Gaul, striking attitudes upon a barren rock, as a sign of your lovelorn condition, you have probably forgotten, my dear Roger, my encounter upon the cars with an ideal grisette, who saved me from the horrors of starvation by generously dividing with me a bag of sugar-plums.  But for this unlooked-for aid, I should have been reduced, like a famous handful of shipwrecked mariners, to feed upon my watch-chain and vest-buttons.  To a man so absorbed in his grief, as you are, the news of the death from starvation of a friend upon the desert island of a railway station, would make very little impression; but I not being in love with any Irene de Chateaudun, have preserved a pleasant recollection of this touching scene, translated from the AEneid in modern and familiar prose.

I wrote immediately,—­for my beauty, of an infinitely less exalted rank than yours, lodges with the post-mistress,—­several fabulous letters to problematic people, in countries which do not exist, and are only designated upon the map by a dash.

Madame Taverneau has conceived a profound respect for a young man who has correspondents in unknown lands, barely sighted in 1821 at the Antarctic pole, and in 1819 at the Arctic pole, so she invited me to a little soiree musicale et dansante, of which I was to be the bright particular star.  An invitation to an exclusive ball, given at an inaccessible house, never gave a woman with a doubtful past or an uncertain position, half the pleasure that I felt from the entangled sentences of Madame Taverneau in which she did not dare to hope, but would be happy if—.

Apart from the happiness of seeing Madame Louise Guerin (my charmer’s name), I looked forward to an entirely new recreation, that of studying the manners of the middle class in their intimate relations with each other.  I have lived with the aristocracy and with the canaille; in the highest and lowest conditions of life are found entire absence of pretension; in the highest, because their position is assured; in the lowest, because it is simply impossible to alter it.  None but poets are really unhappy because they cannot climb to the stars.  A half-way position is the most false.