I wish you to be happy in your own way.  Therefore, in the situation in which we are, instead of deceiving ourselves mutually about our characters and our feelings by noble compliances, let us endeavor to be to each other at once what we should be years hence.  Think always that you have a friend and a brother in me, as I shall feel I have a sister and a friend in you.”

Though it was all said with the utmost delicacy, I found nothing in this first conjugal love-speech which responded to the feelings in my soul, and I remained pensive after replying that I was animated by the same sentiments.  After this declaration of our rights to mutual coldness, we talked of weather, relays, and scenery in the most charming manner,—­I with rather a forced little laugh, he absent-mindedly.

At last, as we were leaving Versailles, I turned to Calyste—­whom I called my dear Calyste, and he called me my dear Sabine—­and asked him plainly to tell me the events which had led him to the point of death, and to which I was aware that I owed the happiness of being his wife.  He hesitated long.  In fact, my request gave rise to a little argument between us, which lasted through three relays,—­I endeavoring to maintain the part of an obstinate girl, and trying to sulk; he debating within himself the question which the newspapers used to put to Charles X.:  “Must the king yield or not?” At last, after passing Verneuil, and exchanging oaths enough to satisfy three dynasties never to reproach him for his folly, and never to treat him coldly, etc., etc., he related to me his love for Madame de Rochefide.

  “I do not wish,” he said, in conclusion, “to have any secrets
  between us.”

Poor, dear Calyste, it seems, was ignorant that his friend, Mademoiselle des Touches, and you had thought it right to tell me the truth.  Well, mother,—­for I can tell all to a mother as tender as you,—­I was deeply hurt by perceiving that he had yielded less to my request than to his own desire to talk of that strange passion.  Do you blame me, darling mother, for having wished to reconnoitre the extent of the grief, the open wound of the heart of which you warned me?

So, eight hours after receiving the rector’s blessing at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, your Sabine was in the rather false position of a young wife listening to a confidence, from the very lips of her husband, of his misplaced love for an unworthy rival.  Yes, there I was, in the drama of a young woman learning, officially, as it were, that she owed her marriage to the disdainful rejection of an old and faded beauty!

Still, I gained what I sought.  “What was that?” you will ask.  Ah! mother dear, I have seen too much of love going on around me not to know how to put a little of it into practice.  Well, Calyste ended the poem of his miseries with the warmest protestations of an absolute forgetting