But no more of this.  I shrink from painting to you the rainbow brightness, the profusion, the exuberant joy of love’s springtime, as we know it.

For ten days we have been in Paris, staying in a charming house in the Rue du Bac, prepared for us by the architect to whom Felipe intrusted the decoration of Chantepleurs.  I have been listening, in all the full content of an assured and sanctioned love, to that divine music of Rossini’s, which used to soothe me when, as a restless girl, I hungered vaguely after experience.  They say I am more beautiful, and I have a childish pleasure in hearing myself called “Madame.”

Friday morning.

Renee, my fair saint, the happiness of my own life pulls me for ever back to you.  I feel that I can be more to you than ever before, you are so dear to me!  I have studied your wedded life closely in the light of my own opening chapters; and you seem to me to come out of the scrutiny so great, so noble, so splendid in your goodness, that I here declare myself your inferior and humble admirer, as well as your friend.  When I think what marriage has been to me, it seems to me that I should have died, had it turned out otherwise.  And you live!  Tell me what your heart feeds on!  Never again shall I make fun of you.  Mockery, my sweet, is the child of ignorance; we jest at what we know nothing of.  “Recruits will laugh where the veteran soldier looks grave,” was a remark made to me by the Comte de Chaulieu, that poor cavalry officer whose campaigning so far has consisted in marches from Paris to Fontainebleau and back again.

I surmise, too, my dear love, that you have not told me all.  There are wounds which you have hidden.  You suffer; I am convinced of it.  In trying to make out at this distance and from the scraps you tell me the reasons of your conduct, I have weaved together all sorts of romantic theories about you.  “She has made a mere experiment in marriage,” I thought one evening, “and what is happiness for me had proved only suffering to her.  Her sacrifice is barren of reward, and she would not make it greater than need be.  The unctuous axioms of social morality are only used to cloak her disappointment.”  Ah!  Renee, the best of happiness is that it needs no dogma and no fine words to pave the way; it speaks for itself, while theory has been piled upon theory to justify the system of women’s vassalage and thralldom.  If self-denial be so noble, so sublime, what, pray, of my joy, sheltered by the gold-and-white canopy of the church, and witnessed by the hand and seal of the most sour-faced of mayors?  Is it a thing out of nature?

For the honor of the law, for her own sake, but most of all to make my happiness complete, I long to see my Renee content.  Oh! tell me that you see a dawn of love for this Louis who adores you!  Tell me that the solemn, symbolic torch of Hymen has not alone served to lighten your darkness, but that love, the glorious sun of our hearts, pours his rays on you.  I come back always, you see, to this midday blaze, which will be my destruction, I fear.