could make difficulties!  Only the Faubourg Saint-Germain can do that! and yet she has not ten pounds of flesh on her bones!

“Poor Lucien!  Dear ambitious failure!  I am thinking of your future life.  Well, well! you will more than once regret your poor faithful dog, the good girl who would fly to serve you, who would have been dragged into a police court to secure your happiness, whose only occupation was to think of your pleasures and invent new ones, who was so full of love for you—­in her hair, her feet, her ears—­your ballerina, in short, whose every look was a benediction; who for six years has thought of nothing but you, who was so entirely your chattel that I have never been anything but an effluence of your soul, as light is that of the sun.  However, for lack of money and of honor, I can never be your wife.  I have at any rate provided for your future by giving you all I have.

“Come as soon as you get this letter and take what you find under my pillow, for I do not trust the people about me.  Understand that I mean to look beautiful when I am dead.  I shall go to bed, and lay myself flat in an attitude—­why not?  Then I shall break the little pill against the roof of my mouth, and shall not be disfigured by any convulsion or by a ridiculous position.

“Madame de Serizy has quarreled with you, I know, because of me; but when she hears that I am dead, you see, dear pet, she will forgive.  Make it up with her, and she will find you a suitable wife if the Grandlieus persist in their refusal.

“My dear, I do not want you to grieve too much when you hear of my death.  To begin with, I must tell you that the hour of eleven on Monday morning, the thirteenth of May, is only the end of a long illness, which began on the day when, on the Terrace of Saint-Germain, you threw me back on my former line of life.  The soul may be sick, as the body is.  But the soul cannot submit stupidly to suffering like the body; the body does not uphold the soul as the soul upholds the body, and the soul sees a means of cure in the reflection which leads to the needlewoman’s resource—­the bushel of charcoal.  You gave me a whole life the day before yesterday, when you said that if Clotilde still refused you, you would marry me.  It would have been a great misfortune for us both; I should have been still more dead, so to speak—­for there are more and less bitter deaths.  The world would never have recognized us.

“For two months past I have been thinking of many things, I can tell you.  A poor girl is in the mire, as I was before I went into the convent; men think her handsome, they make her serve their pleasure without thinking any consideration necessary; they pack her off on foot after fetching her in a carriage; if they do not spit in her face, it is only because her beauty preserves her from such indignity; but, morally speaking they do worse.