The very strength of hatred which makes me long for Madame de Rochefide’s death—­ah, heavens! a natural death, pleurisy, or some accident—­makes me also understand to its fullest extent the power of my love for Calyste.  That woman has appeared to me to trouble my sleep,—­I see her in a dream; shall I ever encounter her bodily?  Ah! the postulant of the Visitation was right,—­Les Touches is a fatal spot; Calyste has there recovered his past emotions, and they are, I see it plainly, more powerful than the joys of our love.  Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany.  Poor Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious rival!  But this is prostitution!  I am not myself; I am ashamed of it all.  A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande and those sands of Croisic.

August 25th.

I am determined to go and live in the ruins of the old chateau.  Calyste, worried by my restlessness, agrees to take me.  Either he knows life so little that he guesses nothing, or he does know the cause of my flight, in which case he cannot love me.  I tremble so with fear lest I find the awful certainty I seek that, like a child, I put my hands before my eyes not to hear the explosion—­

Oh, mother!  I am not loved with the love that I feel in my heart.  Calyste is charming to me, that’s true! but what man, unless he were a monster, would not be, as Calyste is, amiable and gracious when receiving all the flowers of the soul of a young girl of twenty, brought up by you, pure, loving, and beautiful, as many women have said to you that I am.

Guenic, September 18.

Has he forgotten her?  That’s the solitary thought which echoes through my soul like a remorse.  Ah! dear mamma, have all women to struggle against memories as I do?  None but innocent young men should be married to pure young girls.  But that’s a deceptive Utopia; better have one’s rival in the past than in the future.

  Ah! mother, pity me, though at this moment I am happy as a woman
  who fears to lose her happiness and so clings fast to it,—­one way
  of killing it, says that profoundly wise Clotilde.

I notice that for the last five months I think only of myself, that is, of Calyste.  Tell sister Clotilde that her melancholy bits of wisdom often recur to me.  She is happy in being faithful to the dead; she fears no rival.  A kiss to my dear Athenais, about whom I see Juste is beside himself.  From what you told me in your last letter it is evident he fears you will not give her to him.  Cultivate that fear as a precious product.  Athenais will be sovereign lady; but I who fear lest I can never win Calyste back from himself shall always be a servant.

  A thousand tendernesses, dear mamma.  Ah! if my terrors are not
  delusions, Camille Maupin has sold me her fortune dearly.  My
  affectionate respects to papa.