Ah, my dear mamma! at the end of three months to know what it is to be jealous!  My heart completes its experience; I now feel the deepest hatred and the deepest love!  I am more than betrayed,—­I am not loved.  How fortunate for me to have a mother, a heart on which to cry out as I will!

It is enough to say to wives who are still half girls:  “Here’s a key rusty with memories among those of your palace; go everywhere, enjoy everything, but keep away from Les Touches!” to make us eager to go there hot-foot, our eyes shining with the curiosity of Eve.  What a root of bitterness Mademoiselle des Touches planted in my love!  Why did she forbid me to go to Les Touches?  What sort of happiness is mine if it depends on an excursion, on a visit to a paltry house in Brittany?  Why should I fear?  Is there anything to fear?  Add to this reasoning of Mrs. Blue-Beard the desire that nips all women to know if their power is solid or precarious, and you’ll understand how it was that I said one day, with an unconcerned little air:—­

  “What sort of place is Les Touches?”

  “Les Touches belongs to you,” said my divine, dear mother-in-law.

  “If Calyste had never set foot in Les Touches!”—­cried my aunt
  Zephirine, shaking her head.

  “He would not be my husband,” I added.

  “Then you know what happened there?” said my mother-in-law, slyly.

  “It is a place of perdition!” exclaimed Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel. 
  “Mademoiselle des Touches committed many sins there, for which she
  is now asking the pardon of God.”

“But they saved the soul of that noble woman, and made the fortune of a convent,” cried the Chevalier du Halga.  “The Abbe Grimont told me she had given a hundred thousand francs to the nuns of the Visitation.”

  “Should you like to go to Les Touches?” asked my mother-in-law. 
  “It is worth seeing.”

  “No, no!” I said hastily.

  Doesn’t this little scene read to you like a page out of some
  diabolical drama?

  It was repeated again and again under various pretexts.  At last my
  mother-in-law said to me:  “I understand why you do not go to Les
  Touches, and I think you are right.”

Oh! you must admit, mamma, that an involuntary, unconscious stab like that would have decided you to find out if your happiness rested on such a frail foundation that it would perish at a mere touch.  To do Calyste justice, he never proposed to me to visit that hermitage, now his property.  But as soon as we love we are creatures devoid of common-sense, and this silence, this reserve piqued me; so I said to him one day:  “What are you afraid of at Les Touches, that you alone never speak of the place?”

  “Let us go there,” he replied.

  So there I was caught,—­like other women who want to be caught,
  and who trust to chance to cut the Gordian knot of their
  indecision.  So to Les Touches we went.