I shall be before another altar in a convent at Nantes betrothed forever to Him who will neither fail nor betray me.  But I do not write to sadden you,—­only to entreat you not to hinder by false delicacy the service I have wished to do you since we first met.  Do not contest my rights so dearly bought.

If love is suffering, ah!  I have loved you indeed, my Calyste.  But feel no remorse; the only happiness I have known in life I owe to you; the pangs were caused by my own self.  Make me compensation, then, for all those pangs, those sorrows, by causing me an everlasting joy.  Let the poor Camille, who is no longer, still be something in the material comfort you enjoy.  Dear, let me be like the fragrance of flowers in your life, mingling myself with it unseen and not importunate.

To you, Calyste, I shall owe my eternal happiness; will you not accept a few paltry and fleeting benefits from me?  Surely you will not be wanting in generosity?  Do you not see in this the last message of a renounced love?  Calyste, the world without you had nothing more for me; you made it the most awful of solitudes; and you have thus brought Camille Maupin, the unbeliever, the writer of books, which I am soon to repudiate solemnly—­you have cast her, daring and perverted, bound hand and foot, before God.

I am to-day what I might have been, what I was born to be, —­innocent, and a child.  I have washed my robes in the tears of repentance; I can come before the altar whither my guardian angel, my beloved Calyste, has led me.  With what tender comfort I give you that name, which the step I now take sanctifies.  I love you without self-seeking, as a mother loves her son, as the Church loves her children.  I can pray for you and for yours without one thought or wish except for your happiness.  Ah! if you only knew the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in thought above all petty earthly interests, and how precious is the thought of DOING (as your noble motto days) our duty, you would enter your beautiful new life with unfaltering step and never a glance behind you or about you.  Above all, my earnest prayer to you is that you be faithful to yourself and to those belonging to you.  Dear, society, in which you are to live, cannot exist without the religion of duty, and you will terribly mistake it, as I mistook it, if you allow yourself to yield to passion and to fancy, as I did.  Woman is the equal of man only in making her life a continual offering, as that of man is a perpetual action; my life has been, on the contrary, one long egotism.  If may be that God placed you, toward evening, by the door of my house, as a messenger from Himself, bearing my punishment and my pardon.

Heed this confession of a woman to whom fame has been like a pharos, warning her of the only true path.  Be wise, be noble; sacrifice your fancy to your duties, as head of your race, as