Madame de Rochefide to Calyste.

You are a noble child, but you are only a child.  You are bound to Camille, who adores you.  You would not find in me either the perfections that distinguish her or the happiness that she can give you.  Whatever you may think, she is young and I am old; her heart is full of treasures, mine is empty; she has for you a devotion you ill appreciate; she is unselfish; she lives only for you and in you.  I, on the other hand, am full of doubts; I should drag you down to a wearisome life, without grandeur of any kind, —­a life ruined by my own conduct.  Camille is free; she can go and come as she will; I am a slave.

You forget that I love and am beloved.  The situation in which I have placed myself forbids my accepting homage.  That a man should love me, or say he loves me, is an insult.  To turn to another would be to place myself at the level of the lowest of my sex.

  You, who are young and full of delicacy, how can you oblige me to
  say these things, which rend my heart as they issue from it?

I preferred the scandal of an irreparable deed to the shame of constant deception; my own loss of station to a loss of honesty.  In the eyes of many persons whose esteem I value, I am still worthy; but if I permitted another man to love me, I should fall indeed.  The world is indulgent to those whose constancy covers, as with a mantle, the irregularity of their happiness; but it is pitiless to vice.

You see I feel neither disdain nor anger; I am answering your letter frankly and with simplicity.  You are young; you are ignorant of the world; you are carried away by fancy; you are incapable, like all whose lives are pure, of making the reflections which evil suggests.  But I will go still further.

Were I destined to be the most humiliated of women, were I forced to hide fearful sorrows, were I betrayed, abandoned,—­which, thank God, is wholly impossible,—­no one in this world would see me more.  Yes, I believe I should find courage to kill a man who, seeing me in that situation, should talk to me of love.

You now know my mind to its depths.  Perhaps I ought to thank you for having written to me.  After receiving your letter, and, above all, after making you this reply, I could be at my ease with you in Camille’s house, I could act out my natural self, and be what you ask of me; but I hardly need speak to you of the bitter ridicule that would overwhelm me if my eyes or my manner ceased to express the sentiments of which you complain.  A second robbery from Camille would be a proof of her want of power which no woman could twice forgive.  Even if I loved you, if I were blind to all else, if I forgot all else, I should still see Camille!  Her love for you is a barrier too high to be o’erleaped by any power, even by the wings of an angel; none but a devil would fail to recoil before such treachery.